I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

With all the talk about latest trends and avoiding extinction as communicators, and integrating web 2.0 and wikis, blogs, podcasts, and other interactive social media into help, it’s a good time to look at how Google — practically the leader of the web — does help.

Last week Google released Google Voice, a service that allows you to integrate all your phones into one number and includes a host of features, including voice mail, recording, conference calling, and other services.

To help users get started, Google Voice has a list of 20 short videos. Only the overview video contains animation. It’s certainly the video they’ve put the most work into, and it also functions as marketing collateral.

The other videos are fairly simple, with short looping background music, professional voice talent, and a read script. The defining quality is that each video is short, some as short as 25 seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginning writers trying to break into the field of technical writing face a paradox: almost all jobs require experience, but they can’t get experience without first having a job.

In the past, I’ve recommended that beginning writers create documentation for any open-source project they can find, such as WordPress, Audacity, or projects on SourceForge.net. However, our organization now has about ten open source projects that would provide an ideal opportunity for entry-level writers to gain real experience in technical writing. These projects are located at https://tech.lds.org/wiki. Read the rest of this entry »

Fictitious documentation refers to documentation that fails a lie detector test but which passes the project manager’s approval.

Here’s the situation: You’re writing documentation that will be printed in large quantities. At the deadline for printing, the software still has a few bugs. If you mention the bugs in your documentation, it’s likely the printed documentation will still be around after the bugs are fixed, making your documentation out of date. If you don’t mention the bugs, it’s likely that users will be confused until the bugs are fixed.

Do you lie and pretend the bugs don’t exist? Do you boldly write results statements that you know are pure fiction? Or do you describe the bugs in their nitty, gritty, ugly details? Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever tried to find cool graphics for conceptual diagrams but find yourself coming up empty handed? Sure, sites like istockphoto.com make icons available inexpensively. But no matter what the cost, if you work for a company you still have to submit an expense request, get it approved by management, and then subtract the cost from a dwindling budget. It’s a pain in the neck, and you’re usually in a time crunch, right?

Never fear, Visio is here. Visio has tons of great-looking icons. And they’re all vectors, so they resize seamlessly. There’s only one problem: they’re stuck in Visio.

With a little manipulation, however, you can unfree them from Visio and keep them looking sharp for insertion in InDesign. You need a power app (namely, Adobe Illustrator), but that’s it.

To extract images from Visio and insert them into InDesign, here’s what I do:

1. Open Visio and find the icon you want. Search for “secretary” or “design” and you’ll find the standard bald blue man. Select and copy the image.
   

   Copy the image from Visio

Read the rest of this entry »

In a career development workshop at the TransAlpine Conference in Vienna, Ellis Pratt, one of the founders of Cherryleaf, argued that technical communicators may eventually become extinct if they keep using the same methods and formats to deliver information.

Although there will always be a need for people to explain technical material non-technical people, Ellis said, others may be doing it instead, through the formats users prefer. To survive, technical writers may need to morph into content strategists, managing the information in a systematic way rather than merely creating it.

Ellis started by showing a thought-provoking video from Michael Wesch called “A Vision of Students Today.” In the video, students explain why the traditional educational model is outdated and at odds with the way they learn.

Rather than reading textbooks, today students learn through text messages, virtual chats, Facebook updates, interactive media, blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, collaborative efforts, read/write behavior, forums, podcasts, videocasts, and Google searches. The old book-reading, classroom-lecture model of learning has fallen by the wayside. It’s just not how students get the answers they need. Read the rest of this entry »

With a title like crunching and burning, it may sound like I’m writing about a painful illness, such as having leprosy with third degree burns and walking on sharp gravel. But actually this post is about the terms some companies use to try to make their applications look super-cool. If you’re a web 2.0 company trying to establish your product as the bomb, all the rage, critical to being hip, etc. you can’t use generic names and emotionless adjectives. You want to conjure up some inner appeal to coolness.

So when you upload images into WordPress, you see a progress bar that says “Crunching.” Crunching is sexy. Crunching sounds exciting. Crunching makes you feel like you’re on the edge of some new functionality that is so revolutionary, no other term can quite describe it. But really, all crunching means is resizing. When you upload images in WordPress, the image editor resizes the original image into three separate images: thumbnail, medium, and large.

"Crunching" is really just resizing

The problem with using the term “crunching” rather than “resizing” is that, although it’s cool, most users don’t actually realize what’s going on. They don’t realize that they can set the dimensions that the image is being resized to. They don’t realize this because crunching is vague. Crunching is eating grape nuts, or stepping on cheerios, or feeding tickets into Chuck-E-Cheese counting machines. Crunching rarely means resizing. The tradeoff for cool interface terms is confusion. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I needed to create some visuals for a PowerPoint to illustrate concepts related to blogging. Since I have limited artistic ability (perhaps even negative artistic ability), I resorted to a stick figure person as a common theme. I spent a while trying to decide which tool to use to draw with. It turns out drawing a basic circle in Photoshop that doesn’t have a solid fill is tedious, as are other drawing functions in Photoshop. So I used my favorite little graphics program instead: Snagit.

Snagit 9 introduces a .snag format that saves every object on the screen as a movable part. Of course it’s not as powerful as Photoshop or Illustrator, but it’s a lot quicker and easier. I especially like the Add to Quick Styles feature, so that after defining a shape (for example a line of a certain color, width, and shadow) I can save it to the toolbar and access it immediately.

I also enjoy Snagit’s general ease of use. It’s the one graphics program that Jane found essential for working with images on her blog. I tweeted the other day that I wished more products would have Techsmith’s same usability, and they consequently gave me several product licenses to give away. So look for an upcoming caption contest on my blog shortly.

Here are my little stick figure drawings. You can click the images to see the full sizes.

Visibility

Purpose

The Question

Relevance

Readability

Voice

Story

Revealing Appropriately

Interaction

Regularity

Kenyon Martin screens for Carmelo Anthony

Even if you aren’t watching the NBA playoffs (professional basketball), you’ll probably get the point of this post. Watching a pro basketball team, one thing you realize is that each player has a special position and strength, and they play those strengths rather than their weaknesses.

For example, even when Kenyon Martin has an open jump shot 20 feet away, he often doesn’t take the shot but instead passes it to his teammates, such as Smith or Kleiza, who are much better shooters. Likewise, although Billups and Kleiza may grab a rebound now and then, you won’t see them posting up for the rebound like the other larger players, such as Kenyon Martin or Chris Andersen, the “Bird Man.”

Nene and Anthony have incredibly powerful drives from the side and manage to get close to the rim in just a few spins, but they aren’t the point guards dribbling the ball. They leave the ball handling at the top for Billups and Smith. Everyone plays their strengths, not their weaknesses. That’s how the Nuggets win games. Read the rest of this entry »

This past week I started exercising at lunch—it was the best thing I did all week. Given how sedentary the job of technical writing is, you’d think this would be a no brainer. But in fact, it’s not. My company’s gym is rarely used. I see just two or three people (out of hundreds) in there during lunch.

While working out, I also listen to podcasts. Lately I’d gotten a bit out of the podcast-listening habit, since I was carpooling with someone who didn’t like to take lunch but instead work eight hours straight. After I switched to the bus for transportation (a new bus route opened up in my city), I’ve been able to embrace a more flexible schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

While eating dinner at my mother-in-law’s house today, I stumbled across the following curiosity in the bathroom:

Manual in bathroom as reading material

Kind of an ingenious strategy. A tribute to the cunning intelligence of mothers everywhere!