My Blog has Moved

I bought a new URL, WhyTechComm.com, hired a web designer to style it and add some features I was wanting. I’ll be polishing and tweaking there, still, but I’m pretty pleased with the transformation. I’m aiming for less focus on my professional foibles and more discussion of how tech comm supports business goals.

I moved all my old posts there, so if you’ve commented on a post, your comments were also moved there. Please let me know if you don’t want that, and I will remove them.

This will be my last post over here. Hope to see you on the other side.

A Mini-Workshop: Grassroots Documentation Testing

My presentation proposal for the STC 2011 Summit was accepted! It’s a mini-workshop in the Usability track called “Grassroots Documentation Testing.” I just got the email from Lloyd Tucker, STC’s Deputy Executive Director. I’ve mostly interacted with Lloyd over email, but he’s so thoroughly pleasant that it’s especially enjoyable to get a congratulations from him.

So, yay.

I’ll be leading an exercise and a discussion, and I’ll follow up with a blog post to summarize our ideas.

For the exercise portion, we’ll practice writing scenarios to test user assistance content on hypothetical co-workers. Then we’ll have a brainstorming session to share success stories and discuss solutions for the most critical challenges to do-it-yourself documentation testing.

Hats tipping all over the place to Steve Krug and Tom Johnson.

When I got a copy of Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug, our tech comm department adapted Krug’s do-it-yourself website testing method to test documentation, with an important variable–we tested on co-workers. The resulting benefits were not the ones I expected, nor were the challenges quite the same as the ones covered in Krug’s book.

The reading I’ve done as a novice helps me justify the “why” for testing. Now I want to provide a forum to discuss the “how.”

This discussion is an opportunity to supplement the expert resources on usability with some grassroots collaboration. I’m not an expert, but as a group, we’ll work through an exercise to demonstrate some challenges, then discuss solutions for the most severe issues; a debriefing à la Krug. After the Summit, I’ll blog our group solutions. (This part of the session was inspired by Tom Johnson’s collaborative posts over at IdRatherBeWriting.com.)

I think this will resonate with tech writers and usability novices who need to overcome some obstacles and start somewhere with testing.

Sometimes technical communicators come into a department that has established formats and standards, and it can be difficult to find a point of entry for improving upon those. Or, basic audience analysis may be lacking from a tech comm department’s processes and body of knowledge. In some environments (and also depending on one’s experience level), it can be difficult to make the case for professional usability testing, or for direct access to users. Employers may be more open to low-budget, internal testing.

I’m expecting this to interest creators of users assistance who are already testing their docs or those who want to know how to get started. I expect a mix experience levels in the tech comm field.

What I’m hoping to accomplish:

Otherwise known as the “key learning objectives” part of the session proposal.

• Gain awareness of the process and challenges of writing test scenarios for user assistance
• Gain awareness of what is working and not working for our colleagues
• Increased confidence in the ability to test our content
• Increased proficiency in using collaboration as a problem-solving tool
• Produce a list of solutions that can be shared with the STC community

Hooray! Also, feedback.

What would attract you to this session? What would make you skip it? Do you have any tips on presenting? Do you have a testing story? Please share down in the comments area.

The Old School Itch

I am thinking of going back to school. Again.

Some of you might remember last year when I failed calculus pretty decisively during my first semester of what was possibly going to be a computer science degree. I think I left out the actual failing part, but that’s what happened. That was an online class, though–I know I could have done it in a traditional class.

I’m driven by a couple of things–I want to keep advancing in tech comm or just build something new, and I just plain want to keep learning. I know there are other ways to avoid career plateaus than by going back to school. There are other ways to get technical skills. I can dream up plenty of innovative projects that don’t necessitate me taking a class, right? The thing is, I keep feeling this nagging limitation.

What if I want to build something completely different?

It’s like when I was trying to write songs, and I could sing, but I can’t play an instrument. I know there are singers who do it, but for me it was frustrating. I could find musicians to play with, but I wanted more input. So I learned enough guitar to sketch some songs.

Is it me or the tech comm industry that is at a plateau?

At the companies where I’ve worked (and from talking to people, this doesn’t seem uncommon) documentation is a by-product that is approached later in the product cycle, when the product is stable, and past the point at which people have any energy for the all the benefits it can offer if one is innovative.

When I talk about personas, and sales opportunities, they look at their watches and wonder why I am not just writing it, already. I’m becoming pretty well-versed in the benefits of good user documentation that is part of a larger strategy, but there simply doesn’t seem to be much space for making the argument.

So, I’m going to need more credibility.

And more technical skill. Where I’m at now, the product people and even some of the marketing people are engineers. My impression is that they think personas are cute, at best.

Some of that will be alleviated by me getting more experience. People out there are doing these innovative things with tech comm, and seeing the benefits, and it’s the company that’s missing out when I fail to get the message across, or when they just don’t have ears to hear it. But when the rest of the features in the product are being built based on intuition and domain expertise, why should I expect the help to get treated to more empirical methods?

I’m not oblivious to the fact that I got all wound up like this last time, and that it might pass as soon as I get another project that’s shiny to me.

For now, it’s giving me plenty of blog post ideas.

This is the question I want to answer: do advanced degrees (or additional degrees) for technical communicators pay off?

This can be broken into several parts/posts: how much do technical communicators make with various bachelor degrees or less, how much more do they make with additional degrees, how is that different in different parts of the U.S. and in different parts of the world? How do the degrees contribute to other factors of job satisfaction? Which degrees help the most for which jobs? Do other skills or circumstances play a bigger role in salary and satisfaction?

In the meantime, I’m looking at Illinois Institute of Technology or Illinois State for one of these degrees:

• Graduate Certificate in Systems Analysis
• MS or BS in Information Architecture (not sure which makes more sense, yet)
• BS in Computer Science

Squee!

Self Employment, Meet Family Planning

I have a COBRA letter sitting on my desk, and it’s been there for weeks, pressuring me to decide whether I’m 100% sure I want kids. And if so, like, when?

I quit my job this summer, moved to Chicago, and took contract positions. I’m so glad. The timing was pretty good as far as my skill level, and I’m working plenty. I can definitely afford health insurance, but maybe not health insurance with a pregnancy rider. I’ve got to spend more time comparing the prices to my budget.

So, COBRA seems like it might be a good choice. If I want to get pregnant within the next five months.

18 months of coverage, minus nine months of pregnancy, minus the three months that will have already passed by the time I make this decision, minus a month for whatever I’m not considering.

Five months to figure it out, or else I’ll have to wait a year to be eligible for the coverage I’d be paying out the nose for with a pregnancy rider. I’ll be 32 in December. I want to stay independently employed for a while and maybe launch a company next year.

I’ve been thinking about these things for a month or so, but this weekend, a shit storm erupted online over Penelope Trunk’s TechCrunch post, “Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children.”

It’s really a remix of previous posts (I’ve been a reader of hers for a year or so) about how women do not need to put off children for their careers, plus news about her startup’s recent move, wherein she chose to stay put and be with her family.

I tried looking up research to determine how valid Penelope’s assertion is regarding the genetic cliff of age 35, but I didn’t find much. Only a couple articles related directly to the question, one of which contained a grammatical error that would make me want to scrutinize the site a bit more before I would trust anything on it. (Here’s the better one.) I checked Mayo Clinic’s site, and age was mentioned as a factor in fertility.

Look, Penelope’s strengths are not careful use of statistics or diplomatic wording of her ideas. Her strength is juxtaposing career-related trends in innovative ways, or in pragmatic ways. Like, maybe Power Point slides about your sex life are not as bad as people are making them out to be, or maybe it’s really not worth reporting sexual harassment. Except she usually leaves out the “maybe.” I walk away from her posts with a look-up list, not a to-do list.

So, the TechCrunch article lacks nuance, and it doesn’t apply to everyone. But for those of us who do want children, who weren’t anywhere near the top of the ladder by 27, and who are considering starting our businesses and our families at the same time, it’s a point of reference.

Exactly how hard is this going to be? From a project management standpoint, am I scheduling my newborn sleepless nights at the same time as my 100-hour weeks? If I’m not with my husband or my future husband yet, am I leaving myself enough hours in my week for a social life that will let me find him? Where are my hacks for these issues?

I’m simply not going to stand for anyone telling me it’s taboo to discuss these questions on the internet. I don’t care if they are women entrepreneurs with kids.

The “worst article on the internet ever”? “You’ve taken us back 50 years”? Let’s take it down a notch, people. By reacting with such vitriol, you could be shutting down women for whom these issues are relevant. By reacting with hysteria, you are not representing yourselves well to the venture capitalists you’re so concerned about.

If feminism were that fragile that one article could set it back so much, we would have bigger problems than one author. Are people really angry because it’s detrimental to the cause, or because it cuts on a personal level?

I’d like to see more discussion about how to structure a startup that works better with a family. I know that people end up losing their marriages and being heartbroken over missing their kids. Please, please don’t make them jump through PC hoops of fire to share those experiences.

I don’t want to hear about how “but she shouldn’t speak for all women, so that gives me the right to curse at her on Twitter or call her a disgrace.” That’s high school, and I don’t have time for it. I want to hear about what works.

The Story-Telling Trend

I was having coffee with someone yesterday to talk about his project, and I mentioned my background in creative writing, which led us to the current craze about story-telling.

There is even a med school program with a focus on storytelling for physicians, narrative medicine, which I think is such a great idea. Most doctors I’ve had couldn’t even listen long enough me to give them one sentence of information about my symptoms.

The gentleman yesterday had come to me knowing little about tech comm. In fact, he asked me about the term, “tech comm,” which he had seen sprinkled liberally throughout my blog. “Tech comm” is jargon for the industry of technical communication. Or, if you prefer, stories about using products.

He and I even laughed about his ad agency, which, sure enough, was touting story-telling as their focus. So is story-telling for products a stretch? Actually, no.

A five-step procedure might be technically accurate and pass QA, but a story-teller looks for signs that her audience is engaged. A good story is remembered and can be retold. This could be as simple as writing a short description that places the procedure steps in context. It could be examples. I’m excited to see what else it could be. I think this trend is gaining momentum.

All things being equal, hire the person who can write or speak the best. By definition, that means in story format. I recommend this for two reasons: a person who can tell stories can communicate with and motivate others, they can help define the narrative of the work they’re performing and plan to optimize that narrative, and they can do the same for themselves.

For me, that’s the main benefit of this blog: I tell myself the story of my career. When I take the time to articulate my experiences to myself, I can learn the most from them.

So, I’m a believer in the power of story-telling, even for specs and instructions. It’s just amusing to me that this isn’t obvious, and that companies can generate so much buzz by juxtaposing the term with their own industry jargon.