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Review: ConZentrate
Anyone who’s been reading Tools for Thought on a regular basis has certainly picked up on the theme that managing attention and focus matters far more to me than managing time. While at the library a...
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Are we giving readers what they want, in the way they want it?
That’s a question which has been on my mind for a while now. With all the talk about Web 2.0 and the attendant technologies, I’m wondering if our readers are actually being better served by...
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How to Make Yourself Indispensable
Let me ask you a question: could you disappear? If you didn’t show up at work tomorrow, if you weren’t home at 6:00 for dinner, if nobody ever heard from or saw you again, would it matter? OK, these...
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Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping
The rise of Ajax and rich internet applications has thrown the limitations of traditional wireframing into painful relief. When you leave the world of page-based interactions, how do you document all...
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An Event Apart: Good Design Ain’t Easy
Jason Santa Maria’s Good Design Ain’t Easy talk at An Event Apart 2008 argued for deeper graphic resonance in the presentation of content online.We are trained to look for stories within images. These...
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An Event Apart: The Lessons of CSS Frameworks
At An Event Apart Boston 2008, Eric Meyer walked through common characteristics of several Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) frameworks and outlined lessons that can be learned from their structure.CSS...
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Mike Rohde's amazing sketchnotes from SEED 3
Mike Rohde did another great job drawing sketchnotes at the SEED 3 Conference on June 6th, 2008 (below). Sign up to get notified when we announce the next SEED.The Chicago Reader was also at SEED 3 and...
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The what, when and why of wireframes
I recently presented at a conference on the humble wireframe and thought it would be a good idea to run through some key points. I have also noted that some feel the wireframe is dead, though if...
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Developing knowledge base articles
One great, and often overlooked, sources of user information is a corporate knowledge base (often shortened to KB). Whether used internally or externally, the KB combines user-generated (or, at least,...
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Don’t Bring Me Answers, Bring Me More Questions!
Don’t depend on answers in uncertain timesWe live in a world that seems endlessly hungry for answers: preferably quick, unambiguous, definitive, once-and-for-all, simple answers. We want to be told...
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How to Succeed As a First-Time UX Manager
By Jim NietersPublished: July 7, 2008In my last column, I suggested that being a manager of UX is no better—and no worse—than being a great designer or user researcher, but the roles are very...
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Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know
The future of software development is about good craftsmen. With infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and an abundance of basic libraries, it no longer takes a village to build a good piece of...
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On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving
Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2008 | Inman NewsLater this morning, I’m honored to be delivering the keynote address at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference here in San Francisco —...
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The importance of writing meaningful error messages
The other day, was perusing Yahoo! News. I saw a story that looked interesting, and clicked the link. What appeared wasn’t the story. In the title bar of my browser were the words:Multi-Hop Cycle...
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Four Projects That Break Your Routine
If you’ve done similar jobs in a row, such as designing websites for 10 different auto repair shops or writing hundreds of articles on credit cards, it’s likely that you’re looking for a change. It...
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Personal Essays on a Technical Writing Career — by John Hewitt
John Hewitt over at Poewar.com has an intriguing series of personal essays on life as a technical writer.A Career in Technical Writing: The beginning of a new seriesA Career in Technical Writing: Life...
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Top 10 Conversation Hacks [Lifehacker Top 10]
A whole lot more than just words passes between people who are talking, so a few simple conversational skills can help you recognize what's really being said and help you lead the discussion your way....
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A question and an answer about style guides
I briefly discussed style guides in a post a couple of weeks ago. The other day, a reader of this blog left the following comment:Should documents that failed to match with the specified style guide be...
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Content Remix: Floss Manuals Provides Community Technology, Community Writing
Many technical writers, content managers and information architects work on software development teams, or at least tangentially to them. You may have heard of Google’s Summer of Code or BarCamp or...
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Mentoring another writer
For some reason or the other, I got thinking about mentoring the other day. And I realized that I’ve never had a real mentor in this business. When I was starting out, I exchanged ideas and knowledge...
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What is usability?
That sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it? But the answer is not as simple as it seems, as this blog post explains. Usability, according to the post’s author, encompasses:Learnability— how easily...
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Giving up a little control to get a whole lot more
Over the last several months, I’ve been talking with a number of technical communicators about ideas/concepts, technologies, and trends in our profession. Two topics (or it is just one?) that keep...
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Word Macro for Resizing Images that Have a Specific Style
When you single source from an online help authoring tool and generate an output to Microsoft Word, almost invariably you have some clean-up reformatting to do. For me, one of these areas deals with...
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Testing Documentation
As part of the product, testing documentation seems like an obvious thing to do, but what does it really mean? I’ve fielded the question in a few different places now and it’s always interesting to...
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U.S. Federal Government Silences Typo Spotters; Forces Them To Stop...
In a nation that prides itself on its freedom of expression comes this ridiculous story—Typo Vigilantes Answer To The Letter Of The Law—featured in The Arizona Republic. The story starts our like this:...
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What Happens to a Verb Deferred?
Even more than pubs, old movie houses, and ancient ballparks, I love bookstores. For me, a bookstore is like sex or pizza: even when it's bad it's good. My kind of bookstore has book carts in front of...
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Rebuild Your Resume with Five Simple Fixes [Job Search]
Once you've spotted a great job anywhere online and figured out how much moolah to ask for, you need to get your foot in the door. In most cases, your foot is your resume, and every person you've ever...
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Freeing up Time: Beginning with a Different End in Mind
Any labor-saving technology offers two potentials, depending on the mindset of the user:Reducing the amount of time needed to achieve a desired outputIncreasing the amount of output within the...
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Reversing the Multitasking Impulse
At least a couple of times a month, some new publication or productivity blog will critique multitasking, usually as though the case against multitasking is a new idea. In fact, virtually no one...
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How to bull your shoes
Video on how to bull your shoes (bull = put a really nice polish on them).1000 circles! From the same series: checkmate in four moves. (via acl) (link)
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Human motivation as a way to understand user goals
At Cooper we talk a lot about goal-directed design. Usually the term "goal" is used without an explicit distinction between goals and a motivations. The distinction is an important one which can...
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Review: Brain Rules
What would learning and other aspects of mental performance look like if they complied with the latest findings in brain research? That’s the question that developmental molecular biologist John Medina...
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A Universal Declaration of Users’ Rights
We’re coming up on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10. I’m a big supporter of this, and of Amnesty International, which works to protect these rights....
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Making Time for the MITs (Most Important Things) [Back To Work]
Over the past 14 years, I have studied productivity, the learning process, and time management. Just six years ago, I returned to university to earn a degree in psychology to understand the...
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Five intranet publishing models
I’m doing a lot of writing about authoring and publishing on intranets at present. As part of this, I’ve outlined five fundamental basic models. Sketching these in outline form:fully centralised...
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How help search should work
Thanks to Internet search engines like Google, software users have become more comfortable using search as their primary means of accessing help content.Every help authoring tool seems to have a...
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12 Personality Types to Avoid to Make 2009 Your Best Year
Forever ResultsWhen it comes to creating life-long positive change in our world (that is, “forever results”), most people won’t and don’t - despite their constant attempts to re-invent themselves and...
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What's your technical writing personality type?
Examine any large team of technical writers and you'll likely find a wide array of personalities. Few will fall into the "Tina the Tech Writer" stereotype. Also, each personality will bring different...
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Fun with installers
Installer design is a special treat for an experience designer - the best user experience is no experience at all. It’s usually unfamiliar, it’s putting bits on your system and words like “fear” come...
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9 Lists To Keep Updated, and Keep Handy
I bought a Moleskine notebook a long time ago, and for a while it got zero use. My productivity system is totally digital and Web-based, as is my personal journal. I bought the Moleskine because it...
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Calculating the Optimal Workday Length
There’s a lot of information out there on achieving work-life balance, and a common productivity suggestion is that you structure your workday. I’ve found that one invaluable tool for getting these two...
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Productivity 101
Last night I shared some productivity tips with my Toastmasters club, so I thought it would be a good idea to share those tips with you as well.These tips are not complicated, but they’ve proven very...
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Two Stories About How to Write Help
The mindset in which most technical communicators write help is sometimes fundamentally flawed. Consider the following two stories and the different approaches and mindsets each writer takes toward the...
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Documentation Usability: A Few Things I’ve Learned from Watching Users
I received another question from John from Delaware. It was actually in his other e-mail, but I neglected to address it because I don’t usually spend so much time answering readers’ questions. This...
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What Users Don’t Care About
It seems most of the conversations in our industry today revolve around value. If you go to stc.org, the large graphic at the center of the site says “The Value of Technical Communication.” (Given the...
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Let's just call plans what they are: guesses
Busting your ass planning something important? Feel like you can’t proceed until you have a bulletproof plan in place? Replace “plan” with “guess” and take it easy. That’s all plans really are anyway:...
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Strategy Starts with Honesty
I always make a point of encouraging my clients to have a strong vision and a strategy for achieving that vision before they set out to design their products.I need to start practicing what I preach....
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Grammar Workshop: How to Make a Verb Match the Correct Subject with Or
by Jennie RubyOne of the most fun rules of grammar to me is this one: When a sentence has two subjects, and the two subjects are joined by the word or, you match the verb to the subject closer to the...
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Web Design is a Journey
Editor’s Note: Mike will be speaking at FOWD NYC on “Bucking Trends and Breaking Conventions”.On the July 9th 2009 we launched a complete redesign of Carsonified and the Think Vitamin blog. I thought...
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Do Screen Captures Still Make Sense?
By Paul Masalsky, EMC Corporation Writing more simply helps keep content more manageable and can increase its usability. So why do we continue to litter content with screen captures, which can be...
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