June 2007 Issue
Audio and the User Experience
Published: June 18, 2007
For most people, sound is an essential part of everyday living. Sound can deliver entertainment—like our favorite music or the play-by-play call of our hometown baseball—and vital information—like the traffic and news reports on the radio as we drive to work.
Audio signals also help us interact with our environment. Some of these signals are designed: We wake to the buzz of the alarm clock, answer the ringing telephone, and race to the kitchen when the shrill beep of the smoke alarm warns us that dinner is burning on the stove. Other audio signals are not deliberately designed, but help us nonetheless. For instance, we may know the proper sound of the central air conditioning starting, the gentle hum of the PC fan, or the noise of the refrigerator. So, when these systems go awry, we notice it immediately—something doesn’t sound right. Likewise, an excellent mechanic might be able to tell what is wrong with a car engine just by listening to it run.
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Category: Columns
Walking Through Your Product Design With Stakeholders
Published: June 4, 2007
You are the lead designer—or perhaps even the sole designer on a product team. You have just completed your product design, and it’s time to walk through your design approach with the project stakeholders, including management, developers, and users. What do you need to do to prepare for your presentation?
This article provides some basic tips to help you better prepare to walk through your product designs with stakeholders.
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Category: Features
Four Factors of Agile UX
Published: June 4, 2007
On a quiet spring morning, one of our clients—the director of a small firm with ten employees—called our office and wanted to see me the very same day to discuss a new project. When we met in the afternoon, he told me his firm needed a new Web site for the launch of their latest product, which they would promote—and, hopefully, sell—only on the Web. The site was to include communications tools for interacting with customers, Help, and a blog on which they’d announce new versions of the product.
Nothing strange so far. The firm meant to invest, as it had previously done, in user-centered design, online promotion, and development by my firm and two other partners. However, toward the end of the meeting, the director told me that everything must be online in three weeks’ time for a fair, and the whole site must be completed on a budget of less than $15,000.
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Category: Features
The STC 54th Annual Conference
Published: June 4, 2007
Describing a professional conference is a lot like the proverbial tale of the blind men and the elephant. One felt the leg and thought it was like a tree; another, the side and thought it was like a wall; and yet another, the tail and thought it was like a rope. Jared Spool opened his blog about the recent STC conference, “Where Did Technical Writing Go?” 
with the following observation:
“It is at the 54th Annual Conference of the Society of Technical Communicators, this week in Minneapolis, where I’m getting a glimpse into what I believe to be the demise of technical writing.”
I think Jared must have been standing at the wrong end of the elephant. What I saw was a society of professionals emerging from a process of reflection and redefinition with a vitality and momentum that said, “There’s a new sheriff in town, and she’s brought the posse with her.”
The sheriff is Susan Burton, the new STC Director who opened the conference by reporting on some significant changes that have happened this year.
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Category: Reviews
Conference Review: STC Technical Communication Summit, Usability Track
Published: June 4, 2007
As a technical writer, I’ve been aware of the Society of Technical Communicators (STC) since I was in college. However, I’ve never joined the organization. This year, the STC Technical Communication Summit was held just a short drive away from me in Minneapolis, on May 12–16, 2007, and my employer paid for me to go.
The best part of my experience at the STC Summit was meeting people who, like me, are craving information on the trends of which we are such a large part—such as Web 2.0, user-centered design, and new software tools. For the most part, I got the information I craved. As a technical writer who is professionally heading deep into usability and user interface (UI) design, I actually went to the conference for the usability certificate program.
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Category: Reviews