2D is Better Than 3D

Most abstract information spaces work poorly in 3D because they are non-physical. If anything, they have at least a hundred dimensions, so visualizing an information space in 3D means throwing away 97 dimensions instead of 98: hardly a big enough improvement to justify the added interface complexity.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1998). Design>Web Design>Usability

The ABCs of Writing a Technical Glossary    

This article identifies and explains format rules, style rules, and lexicographic conventions that have been shown to improve clarity and precision in a technical glossary. Rationale for the rules of language, presentation, and style are examined. The need to allow flexibility in following the rules is discussed in terms of strengthening the technical merit and vitality of the glossary. This article also describes the computer-display techniques and file-management system used in committee to develop U.S. Federal Standard 1037C, Glossary of telecommunication terms, and to display the results both in the meeting room and on the Internet between meetings.

Gray, Evie, William Ingram and Dennis Bodson. Technical Communication Online (1998). Articles>Editing>Technical Editing>Glossary

The Academe-Industry Partnership: What's In It For All of Us?    

I'm always puzzled by the misunderstanding, distrust, and sometimes downright animosity between academic and practitioner members of the technical communication family. At its extremes, this attitude manifests itself in practitioners who consider research and theory to be ivory tower games with no relevance to their practice, and in professors who regard practitioners as ignorant anti-intellectuals. The vast majority of us, of course, would never admit to being either academic snobs or practitioner rednecks, but many of us evidence less extreme vestiges of these biases.

Hayhoe, George F. Technical Communication Online (1998). Articles>Collaboration>TC

Academic Cover Letters

When you're applying for a faculty position with a college or university, the cover letter is your first chance to make a strong impression as a promising researcher and teacher. Below you'll find some strategies for presenting your qualifications effectively in an academic context.

Purdue University (1998). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters

Academic Training for Independent Contractors and Consultants  

We need academic, along with, professional training, defining 'academic training' as conceptual and theoretical, future-oriented and speculative.

Farkas, David K. STC Orange County (1998). Presentations>Education>Consulting

Academic/Industry Relationships  

Technical Communication educators and professionals share one important concern: the future. The most important way in which both parties can shape the future is by working together to support the future technical communications community: students. STC’s Academic Industry Committee has developed a faculty internship to support direct connections between the faculty members who prepare student technical communicators and the companies who will employ them. These and other Academic Industry Committee projects are designed to bring the best of two groups working in one valuable goal and profession more closely and cooperatively together. The future depends on our work – together.

Fink, Bonnie L., Roger A. Grice, Sandra Harner, Deborah Rosenquist and Katherine E. Staples. STC Proceedings (1998). Careers>Academic>Collaboration

Achieving It All!  

An observation can be made about success—everybody talks about it, but far too few do anything definite to ensure their own personal success. To be successful, you must know how to set and achieve goals, build a personal success plan, and develop self-motivation. Tapping into your unlimited potential allows you to progress, grow, and change. Powerful tools can be used to achieve your personal and professional goals. Understanding the role of visualization and how to formulate and use affirmations will help you become more successful!

Laurent, J. Suzanna. STC Proceedings (1998). Careers>Advice

Active Learning for Software Products    

This article shows how principles from the fields of adult learning and situated learning can be applied to the method of Instructional System Design to create classroom-based training for software products. These principles and methods do not need to be antithetical; rather, they can complement each other to create instructional strategies that incorporate context-rich activities for work-oriented instruction.

Hughes, Michael A. Technical Communication Online (1998). Academic>Computing>Instructional Design>Software

Adapting Traditional Editing Practices for Online Documentation

Developing a process and using guidelines for editing online documents, both rooted in traditional editing practices.

Fink, Bonnie L., Carol E. Gasser, Jennifer L. Giordano and Beth A. Williams. STC Orange County (1998). Presentations>Documentation>Editing

Adapting Traditional Editing Practices for Online Documentation  

Technical editors are possibly best known for their abilities to transform information with format, content, grammatical, and mechanical problems into coherent, concise, understandable, and usable documents. Editors must not only provide such services for the information authors, but they must also understand and support users' needs and expectations. This presentation gives editors an approach to editing online documentation that is rooted in traditional editing practices.

Fink, Bonnie L., Carol Gasser, Jennifer Giordano and Beth A. Williams. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Editing>Documentation>Online

Adaptive Technologies for the Visually Impaired: The Role of Technical Communicators    

This column examines emerging technologies of interest to technical communicators to help them identify those that are worthy of further investigation. It is intended neither as an endorsement of any technology or product, nor as a recommendation to purchase.

Ray, Deborah S. and Eric J. Ray. Technical Communication Online (1998). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Visual

Adaptive Technologies for the Visually Impaired: The Role of Technical Communicators

Try your ordinary web browsing and e-mail with an translucent piece of plastic draped over your monitor, with your monitor partially obstructed, or with your monitor turned off. With each of these changes, you’ll have a significantly different experience. For example, if you have plastic draped over your monitor, you’ll likely have a hard time reading words, interpreting graphics, or distinguishing colors. If your monitor is partially obstructed, you’ll likely have a difficult time navigating pages, reading columnar formats, or associating graphics with text. And, of course, if your monitor is off, you’ll have an entirely different set of challenges in accessing and using information. Each scenario offers a different view of the information onscreen, poses different challenges, and, most important, each is significantly different from unimpaired viewing.

Ray, Deborah S. and Eric J. Ray. TECHWR-L (1998). Design>Accessibility

Adding Semantics to SGML Databases

Technical writers who must maintain complex, delicately interconnected information often look to object-oriented SGML databases as a way of storing, retrieving, reusing, and reassembling the constituent objects of new documents, created on the fly to respond to a particular customer’s needs. The SGML tags help identify structural packages such as procedures, illustrations, or glossary items; in a large database, then, writers can filter out unwanted material, locating only the structural pieces they need for the job in hand. For instance, to produce a quick reference, a writer might pull up the names of procedures and their steps, but not the introductions or explanations. Similarly, a user could search for illustrations only. But illustrations of what? With no subject matter defined, such searches result in hundreds, even tens of thousands of hits. To speed up access to the precise passages wanted, end users and writers need a way to narrow their searches by defining the precise subject matter (the meaning, or semantics) as well as the structural elements they seek.

Mazumdar, Subhasish, Weifeng Bao, Zhengang Yuan and Jonathan R. Price. Communication Circle, The (1998). Design>Information Design>SGML>Semantic

Adducive: Articles about User Interface Design

Tips and articles on software user interface design, including handheld, speech recognition, desktop, and web-based software, with a focus on the software development process and issues in internationalization. The site also describes services offered and my approach to user interface design.

Krause, Brian R. Adducive.com (1998). Design>User Interface>Software

Adobe Acrobat: Publishing Online Documentation  

Documentation departments are often faced with the challenge of quickly distributing high-quality versions of printed documentation via the company Intranet, the World Wide Web, or CD-ROM. Adobe Acrobat is a simple, cost-effective way to publish documentation for a variety of media and requires little time or technical expertise to produce professional-looking results. Technical writers and web developers can easily use Adobe Acrobat to create portable document format (PDF) files from printed documentation. They can then add links and bookmarks, create an index, produce simple interactive forms, and add multimedia components to their documents.

Ogata, Kerry L. and Thomas A. Witherspoon. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Documentation>Online>Adobe Acrobat

Advanced Blogger  

Blogger's primary advantage is its simplicity--if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you'll find it's just as easy to customize it.

Doctorow, Cory, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott. O'Reilly and Associates (1998). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Advice on Research and Writing

A collection of advice about how to do research and how to communicate effectively (primarily for computer scientists).

Leone, Mark. Carnegie Mellon University (1998). Academic>Writing>Research

AHA: Audio HTML Access  

This report discusses the 'AHA' system for presenting HTML in audio for blind users and others who wish to access the WWW non-visually. AHA is a framework and set of suggestions for HTML presentation based on an initial experiment. Further experimentation and further revisions will be performed with the system.

James, Frankie. Stanford University (1998). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Audio

Alternative Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Publications

If you want to go beyond the usual limits of a traditional readership survey that tells you how well received a publication is, first clarify your objectives. Then you might include additional "impact" questions on your next survey, conduct in-depth focus groups with readers, and conduct some objective, "audience-free" measurements of the publication to see how well those objectives were met.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1998). Articles>Management>Communication>Assessment

Analyze Your Web Site Traffic

If you run a Web site, you're probably already thinking about tracking and analyzing the traffic it gets. Knowing how many pages are accessed, when, by whom, and for what purposes can mean the difference between simply having a Web site and building a sound Web strategy. Understanding how people use your site can help you--and your sales and marketing team--generate more traffic. If you can track your audience, learn which pages and resources are most popular, and identify technical problems and system bottlenecks, you can deliver a better experience. And that's the best way to keep people coming back to your site.

Aviram, Mariva H. Builder.com (1998). Articles>Usability>Assessment

Analyzing Usability of a Beta-Version Web Site Through Server Logs, User Profile Data, and Online Questionnaire Responses  

This paper discusses the use of automated data collection to learn from hundreds of beta-test users of a web-based industrial product database how successfully the product met their needs. The collected data consisted of web server log data, opinion data from online questionnaires and follow-up interviews, and user profile data from telerecruiting and online registration was also collected. In the Proceedings of the 1998 Usability Professionals' Association Conference.

Kantner, Laurie and Larry Rusinsky. Tec-Ed, Inc. (1998). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Anatomy of a Corporate Intranet Project  

Today more and more companies use intranets to communicate with employees and to help them perform their jobs. An intranet is an internal network that operates like the Internet.

Rhines, Becky. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Applying Computer Analysis and Design Techniques to Document Component-Based Software  

Facing the challenges involved in developing documentation for component-based software (for example, object-oriented technology, intelligent agents, and distributed computing) requires a documentation strategy based on the same processes and methodologies used by such technologies. These strategies need to be adapted to meet documentation, rather than coding needs. Developing this strategy now, as component-based technology is still maturing, will help technical communicators keep pace.

Bachmann, Karen L. and Ginger Doherty. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Documentation>Software

An Approach for Applying Cultural Study Theory to Technical Writing Research      

When the idea of culture is expanded to include institutional relationships extending beyond the walls of one organization, technical writing researchers can address relationships between our power/knowledge system and multiculturalism, postmodernism, gender, conflict, and ethics within professional communication. This article contrasts ideas of culture in social constructionist and cultural study research designs, addressing how each type of design impacts issues that can be analyzed in research studies. Implications for objectivity and validity in speculative cultural study research are also explored. Finally, since articulation of a coherent theoretical foundation is crucial to limiting a cultural study, this article suggests how technical writing can be constituted as an object of study according to five (of many possible) poststructural concepts: the object of inquiry as discursive, the object as practice within a cultural context, the object as practice within a historical context, the object as ordered by language, and the object in relationship with the one who studies it.

Longo, Bernadette. Technical Communication Quarterly (1998). Academic>Research>Cultural Theory>Technical Writing