http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/Method_M A listing of works published by Method M in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Method_M http://tc.eserver.org/34283.html http://tc.eserver.org/34283.html You will not draw any slides—in fact do not even launch PowerPoint—until step eight, 80% of the way through the process. Typically, when you want to create a presentation, you open PowerPoint and start creating slides. Slide one, slide two, … slide seventeen… what I am trying to say again? Am I making my point? http://tc.eserver.org/28774.html http://tc.eserver.org/28774.html The Method M blog for technical writers, marketing staff, product managers and others who spend hours each week creating documents. This blog is dedicated to helping you work more efficiently and create better documents. http://tc.eserver.org/28773.html http://tc.eserver.org/28773.html Product documentation is expensive--often, much more expensive than it needs to be. With DITA promising savings of 50% in product documentation preparation costs, and 80% in translation costs, managers need to know what DITA is and if it can work for their organization. This white paper distills the information that managers need to know about DITA. http://tc.eserver.org/27614.html http://tc.eserver.org/27614.html When it comes to providing reliable, flexible and efficient object persistence for software systems, today's designers and architects are faced with many choices. From the technological perspective, the choice is usually between pure Object-Oriented, Object-Relational hybrids, pure Relational and custom solutions based on open or proprietary file formats (eg. XML, OLE structured storage). From the vendor aspect Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, POET and others offer similar but often-incompatible solutions. This article is about only one of those choices, that is the layering of an object-oriented class model on top of a purely relational database. This is not to imply this is the only, best or simplest solution, but pragmatically it is one of the most common, and one that has the potential for the most misuse. http://tc.eserver.org/27411.html http://tc.eserver.org/27411.html It is widely assumed that 5 participants suffice for usability testing. In this study, 60 users were tested and random sets of 5 or more were sampled from the whole, to demonstrate the risks of using only 5 participants and the benefits of using more. Some of the randomly selected sets of 5 participants found 99% of the problems; other sets found only 55%. With 10 users, the lowest percentage of problems revealed by any one set was increased to 80%, and with 20 users, to 95%. http://tc.eserver.org/10494.html http://tc.eserver.org/10494.html Group interviews can be an effective means for collecting information for competitive proposals. Many knowledgeable people who are phobic about writing will talk freely during a group interview. In addition, people who consider themselves too busy to write a section of a proposal may be amenable to committing 2 - 3 hours to a technical or project management interview.