Joining the other online tools is Cellsea, an online photo editor. Now if you use Cellsea with Google Docs you can use an online word processor, a online excel spreadsheet, and an online photo editor (replacing your Snagit or Photoshop). Your WordPress blog is online, your banking is online, your news is online, your gmail is online, your photos are online with Flickr, your videos are online with Youtube. Now even your movies will be onli...
37 Signals quotes research by IBM describing the "paradox of the active user": Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately. They are motivated to get started and to get their immediate task done: they don't care about the system as such and don't want to spend time up front on getting established, set up, or going through learning packages. The “paradox of the active user” is a paradox because users would save time i...
I've been experimenting with an "Ajax shelf" to help users find pages better on the Suncoast chapter site. The Ajax shelf is like a web component that slides up and down when you click a button. I think it's pretty cool. Here's an example: Shelf is hidden: When the user clicks the View Pages link, the shelf expands: When the shelf expands, it has the effect of sliding down. When you click the View Pages link again, the shelf slides back...
Holly Harkness's recent post on 10 rules of technical writing got me thinking about the 10 pet peeves in technical writing that drive me crazy. Here they are: Pet Peeve #1. Instructions that aren't modular. I wish I had a better adjective for this, but do you ever find that instructions you are trying to follow require some unmentioned starting point that you can't get to because the instructions assume you were following along chronolo...
I heard an interesting podcast on the way to work this morning: Jason Van Orden's notes from the Frederator. Jason said Fred Siebert recommends that you find what you're passionate about, and then pursue it online via blogging or other social media. You'll be amazed by the number of people you meet and network with. These people will help take you beyond where you could go yourself. They will help you overcome your weaknesses and broaden...
Sarah O'Keefe just told me the news: Adobe has joined the blogosphere. More importantly, the RoboHelp development team just started a blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/ This is one of the best moves Adobe has made. I guess I was too impatient with my comments on their inaccessibility in my last post. It will be interesting to see how many people use their blog as an access point to provide feedback, recommendations, and comments. Wit...
I attended the latter half of the RoboHelp 6 webinar from Adobe today. I learned about the webinar on Scott Abel's excellent and always timely blog, The Content Wrangler. First I have to say that I was both impressed and frustrated by the RoboHelp webinar. I was impressed by the new RoboHelp features — the simple ability to identify conditional tags at the topic level, the integration of Captivate, the launching of a new screen capture pr...
I just listened to the latest podcast from DMN Communications. In it, Scott and Aaron talk about how to deal with documenting bad software. They asked for listener feedback, so I'd like to offer my opinion. First let me explain their question. They ask what you should do when the application you're documenting is backwards and non-intuitive, and your suggestions for UI and other design changes have been disregarded. Scott and Aaron explai...
WordPress 2.1 offers some major new enhancements that I would like to touch upon here. I think these enhancements are the best thing WordPress has done in a while. Import/Export and the Zen of the Free In a podcast titled the Zen of the Free, Simon Phipps — chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems — explains that open source content only has appeal if you can get your data in and get your data out. Users want to be like butterflys, t...
This NPR story of the day hit home. It's about how teens stay up too late because of the Facebook, MySpace, instant messenger, and other web allurements that are so enticing. Then they wake up in the morning and check their e-mail and poof, an hour goes by and they're already late for school. I often have the same problem -- so my wife has taken the role of the bedtime enforcer. At 9:45 p.m. she turns the computer off for me. My life is s...
The Curse of Knowledge is a concept in a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The curse of knowledge concept has generated quite a bit of buzz. Here's an excerpt, which I got from 37 Signals: People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads o...
A couple of weeks ago, Rhonda recommended Boagworld as a good podcast to listen to. If you're into web design, I also recommend this podcast, particularly the episode on Community Websites. This episode has two parts: Part 1 Part 2 Paul mentioned a few interesting points about communities: Users who can participate and contribute to your site feel more loyalty and belonging to your site. The comments and information they add can also ...
Listen here: Thom Haller, information architect and director of the Center for Plain Language, talks about how to create a site where users can actually find the information they're looking for. Specific topics in this podcast include: The GECKO method (Gather, Evaluate, Chunk, Know, Optimize) for organizing content for websites Arranging information based on user tasks Clarity traps such as familiarity and clutter Meas...
I just posted a podcast with Thom Haller on Tech Writer Voices. It's an interesting podcast, with the central focus on organizing your site's information around tasks the users want to perform. We write help documentation the same way of course, but I hadn't really thought of applying the same principles to a website's information. I haven't yet applied the GECKO principle Thom talks about to my blog or podcast, but I plan to. With Tech ...
Big news in the WordPress world -- 2.1 has been released. I think we've been waiting about a year for this major upgrade. You can download the release from WordPress here. Here's an excerpt from WordPress about what this release includes: Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post. The lossless XML import and export makes it ...
