Portfolio

Most of these samples are from my previous job at the LDS Church IT department. In my current role at Badgeville, I write a lot of JavaScript code examples and other SDK / API documentation, but all the content is behind a community-authenticated site, so I can't link to it here.

Quick Reference Guides

Quick reference guides are one or two page guides that help users get started with an application. Most of the quick reference guides below are confidential, so I replaced the text with lorem ipsum text. Still, you can see the various layouts I designed. Click the images to view the PDFs. Although the branding seems to vary a bit, the guides actually do match the look and feel of the applications.

Here are some more samples:

Calendar quick reference guides
LDS.org getting started guides (These guides were a collaborative effort.)
Quick reference guide template gallery

Screencasts / Video Tutorials

The following screencasts are short video tutorials, usually 3 minutes in length, demonstrating a task with accompanying voiceover. I usually integrate videos into the online help files.

You can see more videos here:

Gospel Library Android videos (Click Video Tutorials)
Study Notebook videos (click the Videos tab)
Calendar videos (click the Videos tab)
Showing Video in Meetinghouses (click the Videos tab)

Online Help

The following are a few online help files for LDS.org applications. I've created a lot of other online help files, many branded differently and with more complex content, but they're behind a firewall. These are three simple online help files for LDS.org applications.

Here are a few more samples:

How-to Guides

The following are several how-to guides (printed user guides), which I single sourced from some of the online help above. The how-to guides have a relatively simple format to accommodate printing from the user's computer.

Here are a few more samples:

Mobile Help

The following is a mobile help file for the Gospel Library app. I generated this mobile output with Flare and modified the skin a bit to make it easier to tap the links on a mobile screen.

Company Blog Articles

The following are links from technology articles I wrote for our organization's technology blog, LDSTech. From Feb 2011 onward, I wrote or edited most articles on the site. The purpose of the site was to increase member awareness of new technology, engage volunteers in beta testing, and attract long-term volunteers to integrate with internal teams.

Here are some additional articles:

Wiki Content

For about two years, I used Mediawiki for all my documentation. Then about a year ago, due to shifting strategies with volunteers, I migrated the content out of the wiki to Flare. The following are few samples of documentation that remained on the wiki. I also helped skin both wikis.

Podcasts

I've recorded more than 125 podcasts, many of which are interviews with tech comm luminaries in the industry or recordings of presentations. Learning how to split and combine audio tracks, normalize audio, and do a host of post-processing to get clear, crisp sound are skills that transfer over to making video tutorials. The following are a short sample of podcasts.

Include It All, Filter It Afterwards, with Mark Baker from Every Page Is Page One

A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, with Donna Spencer

Visual Composing: Document Design for Print and Digital Media, with Jo Mackiewicz

Here are a few more:

To browse through all the podcasts I've recorded, see Podcasts.

Presentations

During the past five years, I've given exactly 50 presentations — either at conferences or online as webinars. Here's a quick list of some of my favorite presentations.

To view more presentations, see Presentations.

Blog Posts

I've published several articles a week on my site, I'd Rather Be Writing, for the past six years. My blog has given me notoriety in the tech comm field, but that's not what drives me to write. I like thinking through experiences, solving problems, and exploring topics on a deeper level. Rather than list blog posts below, I invite you to browse all posts I've tagged as Favorites. I also have an ongoing series on organizing content and findability.

WordPress Consulting

I do WordPress consulting as a side job. I know how to build and design WordPress themes from scratch, but I find it's more cost effective to start from an existing theme and modify it according to customer needs.

Here are a few sites I've worked on. These sites are all relevant to people in the tech comm field.

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