How to Find Your Executive Usability Champion

Discusses making usability routine throughout your organization.

Weinschenk, Susan and Jerome Nadel. Human Factors International (2006). Careers>Usability>Collaboration>Workplace

How to Get Out of a Slump, and Handle Pressure Situations Calmly

It turns out that you can get out of a slump or handle pressure situations comfortably by merely changing your facial expressions. I have been trying this over the past several days and have been completely stunned with what happens.

Johnson, Tom H. Tech Writer Voices (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Workplace

How to Get the Most Out of Conferences

Conferences are what you make of them. If you’re not sure why you’re going, or what you want to get out of the experience, you’re unlikely to get it. This essay gives one perspective on conferences, and how to make them more valuable and engaging experiences. I think in general professional conferences take a very conservative approach to training and education, and it demands that attendees take more responsibility for getting value from the experience than should be necessary.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2003). Articles>Collaboration

How to Get the Most Out of Conferences

Conferences are what you make of them. If you’re not sure why you’re going, or what you want to get out of the experience, you’re unlikely to get it. This essay gives one perspective on conferences, and how to make them more valuable and engaging experiences. I think in general professional conferences take a very conservative approach to training and education, and it demands that attendees take more responsibility for getting value from the experience than should be necessary.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (2003). Academic>Conferences>Collaboration

How to Give and Receive Criticism

Good feedback is rare. It can take a long time to find people who know how to provide useful criticism, instead of simply telling you all the things they think are “wrong” with you or whatever you've made. A good critic spends as much energy describing what something is, as well as what it isn’t. Good criticism serves one purpose: to give the creator of the work more perspective and help them make their next set of choices. Bad criticism uses the opportunity provided by someone else’s work to make the critic feel smart, superior or better about themselves: things that have nothing to do with helping the recipient of the critique.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Articles>Collaboration

How to Manage Smart People

What follows is some advice for managers on how to manager people, especially talented people. I worked for nine years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects, sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me. I think I’m smart, but many of the people who have worked for me definitely were. Over the years I’ve experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I managed others. There's no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think most good managers share.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Careers>Management>Collaboration

How to Organize Educational Meetings for Community and Professional Organizations    

Successful meetings are the end result of a∆ careful planning process. To successfully organize an educational meeting for a community or professional organization, you need to follow a series of steps.

Carliner, Saul. Tieline (2007). Articles>Collaboration>Community Building>STC

How to Pitch an Idea

Coming up with good ideas is hard enough, but convincing others to do something with them is even harder. In many fields the task of bringing an idea to someone with the power to do something with it is called a pitch: software feature ideas, implementation strategies, movie screenplays, organizational changes, and business plans, are all pitched from one person to another.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Articles>Collaboration

How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team

Just how many people does it take to properly manage a website? It depends on the website. Shane Diffily explains how to figure it out.

Diffily, Shane. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>Project Management>Collaboration

How to Revive a Zombie Content Management System

Without care and attention, a CMS can slide into a state of living death. Such systems can be revived by implementing a number of practical (and non-technical) activities.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2002). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration

How to Run a Brainstorming Meeting

The most important thing about a brainstorming session is what happens after it ends. No matter how poorly you run a brainstorming meeting, some decent ideas will surface. But depending on what happens after the session, those ideas may or may not impact anything. So while you can read books and take courses on better brainstorming techniques, the most important thing is figuring out how the brainstorming session fits into the larger decisionmaking process you or your team has.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Articles>Collaboration

How to Run a Design Critique

In the early and middle phases of a project, teams need a way to understand and explore the current direction of the design. The challenge is to create the openness needed for good ideas to surface, while simultaneously cultivating the feedback and criticism necessary to resolve open issues. Unlike a brainstorming meeting, where the exclusive goal is to come up with new ideas, a critique meeting is focused on evaluating a set of existing ideas, and possibly identify future directions or changes. Instead of hoping that hallway and email discussions will lead the team in a good direction, it’s generally worth investing time to set up critique meetings to drive the design forward.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2003). Design>Collaboration

How to Select, Nourish, and Conclude a Mentoring Relationship  

A mentor helps you master the unspoken rules of corporate America. If you are energetic and demonstrate initiative, a mentor welcomes the opportunity to assist your growth. To accomplish your mentoring goals, define what you want to achieve and then select a mentor. A successful mentoring relationship requires nourishing to maintain—you must value your mentor's time and demonstrate appreciation. When you no longer require your mentor's guidance, you can end the mentoring phase of the relationship with honesty and appreciation.

Justice, Kendrea L. STC Proceedings (1993). Presentations>Collaboration>Mentoring

How to Succeed As a First-Time UX Manager

In 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 different. In fact, as the book The First 90 Days [1] points out, the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader.

Nieters, Jim. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Management>Collaboration

How to Take Over a Document 'In Medias Res'  

In this paper I describe my experience in taking over the management of an ongoing, complex, constantly changing, multiauthored document. I offer the following rules: 1. Learn all you can about the document before you make any changes. 2. Clean up the old document. 3. Work within the already existing system. 4. Keep records. 5. Change as little as possible.

Burgan, Murrie W. STC Proceedings (1993). Presentations>Collaboration>Writing

How to Win Information and Influence Technical Experts  

Working with technical experts can be difficult, but it is an essential part of every technical writer’s job. Establishing an effective relationship with the technical experts assigned to your project and maintaining that relationship throughout the project and beyond requires some special techniques: getting off to a good start, winning their confidence, winning their respect, making them understand your situation, making the experience pleasant, helping them look good and establishing an efficient working relationship.

Winsberg, Freya Y. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Collaboration

Humanising Technology: the Studio Lab and Innovation

The central thesis of the report is that in the emerging digitally networked society, the creative arts and cultural institutions are mutating by forming a constellation of productive relationships with the science and technology research system, industry, humanistic and social science scholarship, and with emerging new structures of civil society. This apparently rising density of communication suggests the need to rethink some aspects of the relationship between cultural support policy, innovation and research policy, and the still nascent but interconnected set of concerns about the requirements for widespread creative participation in a 'techno-sphere' increasingly shaped by fast-changing digital media technologies.

Century, Michael. AHDS Performing Arts (2006). Articles>Collaboration>Multimedia

"I Sent You the File as Plain Text!" And Other Lies

Procedures for how to send a file as RTF or plain text in the body of an email.

Stieren, Carl. Simware (1998). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Email

Icon Design Through Collaboration  

A Motorola technical communications team and a University of Illinois writing class collaborated to research and develop a set of icons to use in manuals and in an online information retrieval system. This paper describes this joint venture, reporting on icon design criteria (list of criteria and how they were derived); design testing; design proposals and rationale; and the results.

Harr, Robert G. STC Proceedings (1994). Design>Collaboration>Graphic Design

Identity and International Online Communication  

St.Amant discusses the tendency of online communication to obscure a person's identity and suggests ways people can ensure clear communication with individuals of other cultures.

St. Amant, Kirk R. Intercom (2001). Articles>Collaboration>International>Online

If You Want Something Done Right, Don't Do It Yourself

When you get fed up and do decide to blaze your own trail, don't forget to take some friends along with you. You never know when you're going to run into a wild past participle that you need help taming.

Allen, Jennifer. Boston Broadside (1992). Articles>TC>Collaboration>Workplace

Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study

The Yahoo! platform design team shares their process for defining and designing a pattern and standards library, the process for defining the requirements of the repository and the process for defining the lifecycle of a pattern.

Malone, Erin, Matt Leacock and Chanel Wheeler. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Design>Web Design>Collaboration

Implementing Excellence  

Have you been exposed to one or more quality initiatives? Did this exposure leave you with strong but mixed emotional reactions? In a complex environment of organizational risk and change, how do we as communicators do the right thing the right way? Changes are so rapid that before one new vision of what’s right is fully implemented, it seems that another, even better vision comes in to take its place. By using a Japanese model for customer satisfaction, the product information quality initiatives at my company were implemented in three broad areas: quality assurance and control, quality performance and improvement, and quality excitement and planning.

Goodier, Katherine S. STC Proceedings (1993). Presentations>Collaboration>Assessment>Emotions