I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Usability Newsletter Interview – “I’d Rather Be Writing – The Man Behind the Words”

Monday, November 17th, 2008 Posted in Blogging, Podcasting, creativity, usability | No Comments »

[caption id="attachment_2314" align="alignleft" width="194" caption="Usability SIG Newsletter interview"][/caption] I was recently interviewed by David Dick for the Usability SIG newsletter. The title of the interview is "I'd Rather Be Writing – ... Read more..

10 Ways to Gather Feedback from Users

Friday, October 17th, 2008 Posted in Technical Writing | 5 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_2109" align="alignright" width="331" caption="User Knowledge Empowers You to Drive the Team"][/caption] Ever since I came back from Doc Train West and had my epiphany about the transformative, empowering nature of ... Read more..

An Article That Changed My Approach to Help

Thursday, August 7th, 2008 Posted in Technical Writing, usability | 11 Comments »

After a topic title in your help, what do you write? Do you jump straight into the numbered steps, or do you explain why a user would likely perform the ... Read more..

Customizing Your SharePoint Site? Read These 10 Concepts/Gotchas First

Saturday, June 21st, 2008 Posted in SharePoint | 23 Comments »

Preface: I wrote this post after spending a month digging deeply into SharePoint, attempting to customize and brand the site as well as migrate all my help content to it. ... Read more..

Podcast — Transitioning from Technical Writing into Usability

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 Posted in Tech Writer Voices, usability | 5 Comments »

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts/putkey2.mp3 ] Download MP3 (right-click, select Save Target As) Duration: 30 min. In this podcast, I talk with Theresa Putkey, a usability consultant in Vancouver, about how she transitioned from technical writing into ... Read more..

Implementing WordPress 2.3’s New Tagging Feature

Sunday, October 7th, 2007 Posted in Blogging, WordPress | 21 Comments »

I've been waiting for tags to come out for a while. Now that WordPress 2.3 (Dexter) is here, I'm trying to integrate them into my site to the fullest extent. ... Read more..

Cool Example of AJAX in a Blog — Increases Usability

Saturday, September 15th, 2007 Posted in Blogging, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

Scott Abel's The Content Wrangler has a cool example of using AJAX (asynchronous javascript) in his blog to increase usability. Kevin Shoesmith is the blog designer behind the Wrangler's makeover. ... Read more..