Ideas in the Making

In keeping with what he has written in Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski, alias @LukeW, presented some great ideas about web interface design. He is a proponent of considering mobile devices and considering them first when designing web sites. At the TriUXPA meeting in Raleigh, NC, a bunch of (16 in all) watched his webinar over a catered supper. Good food and food for thought. (Thanks Capstrat for hosting the event.)

By working within the constraints of the size of mobile devices (of whatever shape and size), you can improve the design of a web site (and maybe a web app?) for all types of devices. Going mobile is the right way to go; Luke gave a whole new meaning to “movable type”. People are accessing more information on smaller devices at more locations and at more times. Where to put navigation on smaller screens, how to consider content first (since that’s the value that users seek), and putting mobile thinking above desktop thinking are all ideas flowing from Luke’s brain. His great use of examples made it easy to understand his points. Quoting from Rachel Hinman’s The Mobile Frontier and showing the value of Responsive Web Design (along with responsive multi-level navigation), his presentation covered a range of ideas.

Here are two ideas that Luke did not cover: voice control and multi-layered web design.

Voice Control
As screens shrink and navigation becomes a challenge, the lack of screen space might not be a problem as more voice activation comes into general use. If I can simply say a command or request an action by voice, it doesn’t matter whether there is a navigation menu with that command on it and space is no longer an issue. Whether you are searching on a site or taking action, a verbal command might be all you need to accomplish your goal.

I find it interesting that I am not alone in thinking about this:
Are voice controlled interfaces a new form of interaction design or a replacement for interaction design?.

Multi-Layer Interface
I am using my crystal ball here and foreseeing a time when, just as desktop interfaces went from command line to graphical to multiple windows, the mobile device will offer multiple layers of screens, similar to tabs in a browser, so the user does not have to sacrifice context for content or navigation. Just as layers in graphical design programs let you work on multiple levels, so the designers of mobile devices will create a way for users to layer their screens, whether menus on top of content or multiple layers of content. It’s coming; I’m telling you.

Stay tuned for other ideas on web design. Thanks, Luke for getting the creative juices going.

Joe Welinski has done it again: produced a great tools survey and published the results. Here it is:

• 2013 User Assistance Tools Survey

While the cynical among us might think this is self serving, drawing viewers to his site to drum up more business for his conferences, I think he’s doing a great job and a offering a great service to the professional community. I applaud his effort and want him to know that it’s a great thing that he offers his results for free. He offers caveats, but I grant him those. I think the sampling is representative and I think it does represent the interests of technical writers involved in software user assistance. No problem there. But…

But, I still don’t know if it’s relevant when all the numbers are tallied. Or at least not as relevant as it used to be. Here is some food for thought.

• There is a much bigger field and wider spread of user assistance people than those from a tech writing background and from who call themselves UA professionals.
• User assistance and technical support and online training – the boundaries of these previously separate and silo-ed disciplines are blurring.
• Technology is changing so rapidly, the tool might be obsolete in one generation of technology (which may be less than a year). (Maybe he needs an ongoing survey and results.)
• Tools are proliferating; look at the list of tools that are used by only one or two – that’s a long tail if I ever saw it.

I’m just saying.

Another thought I had is that it might help to distinguish between utilities (screen capture tools or PDF viewers) and full-blown authoring environments – they’re not both “tools”, are they? Utilities are like hand tools; authorizing environments are the entire workshop. There are add-ons to my browser that offer more productivity than some of the tools listed. Now that I think about it, I forgot to list those in my “Other” option. Maybe many of you did, too.

I really appreciated that he listed all the comments. It’s not necessarily easy to read, the way they are all strung together, but at least he included all of them, and I applaud him for it.

The problem with a tools survey is that it assumes that tools are desktop applications, or at least there is a bias in that direction. But are we really only using desktop applications? This survey didn’t even mention social media – does that count as a tool? Certainly we all use search engines and YouTube now when we need info on how to do something new; aren’t some of us using social media for distributing content? I think it’s time to widen the survey to match the diversity of tools and diversity of platforms.

Good job and thanks for sharing your results, Joe! Keep up the good work.

For a day of intense technical communication, comes the event of the year – STC Carolina Chapter Competition Judging. Last year, the chapter did a great job of taking a long drawn-out process of providing feedback on competition entries – both hard copy publications and electronic media of every kind – and compressing it into a single one-day event. Yesterday’s judging event followed that pattern successfully. More than 35 professionals met at the training center on the SAS Campus in Cary, North Carolina for a rousing day of reviewing and evaluating over 70 entries submitted by chapter members from around the Triangle area.

This was as close to real-time as the chapter has accomplished thus far. Short of WebEx-ing with the contributors, this form of judging – with training in the morning and award nominations in the afternoon, and all the evaluations done in between – there is nothing faster, more intense, more extreme than this. The training was led by Jennifer Raisig, the organization by Betsy Kent, and the recruiting by Sheila Loring. Other notables were Larry Kunz, Andrea Wenger, Terry Smith, and Ann-Marie Grissino. In some ways this was a very retro event – bringing together the old timers and looking at good old user manuals – and in other ways it was very up-to-date with new faces and excitement reviewing online videos and multimedia presentations. The organizers did a great job of dividing up the work into small teams; the teams were great at finding a consensus about which works deserved real praise. The little gifts given out during the day kept the event from taking itself too seriously – the split playing cards was a good way to handle a raffle.

Thanks to all the technical communicators who did a great job and gave up a good portion of a Saturday to do this. Thanks to the folks at SAS for making the wonderful facility available. Thanks to the STC Carolina Chapter for having such a cool and innovative and productive event.

A bunch of us met at Capstrat in Raleigh to see the latest webinar sponsored locally by TriUXPA. The webinar speaker, Nathan Curtis, from EightShapes, talked about building HTML prototypes. His talk was titled “Start Full Screen: Organize, Communicate, & Annotate HTML Prototypes”. It was pretty long (an hour and a half) but informative. Many of us agreed that this type of approach and its related framework, would be useful for larger groups devoted to prototyping in HTML, but many of us in the room are working for smaller companies, so we are weighing the usefulness of using EightShape’s product.

The ten of us sat around a conference table and stopped the webinar during the Question-and-Answer time and asked our own questions of each other. Thanks to Evan Carroll from Capstrat for hosting (and for showing me the cool office space he works in) and to Adam Rogers for running the show. Thanks to Bruce Mehrenbloom for kicking off some great discussion and for Michael and others for joining right in.

You can’t argue with Nathan’s approach to modularizing, organizing, and annotating prototypes. With his purist approach to using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he is afforded some freedom from the constraints of other technologies and allowing his prototypes to run on any machine (practically). If you buy his approach to doing HTML/CSS/JavaScript-only prototyping, then the framework that EightShapes offers seems like an intelligent way to work collaboratively and simply. He gets the “truthiness” award for making “doneness” a word. His mentioning of the Transform element in CSS3 and of the IPEVO document camera for collaborative sketching got some additional tangential discussion going. All in all, it was another great TriUXPA meeting and I’m glad I went.

P.S. Some additional podcast discussion is at UIE Brainsparks.

When we have a great event, such as the TriUXPA meeting tonight, we realize what great things collaboration can accomplish! Richard Phelps, the president of the chapter; the speakers, Rex Hartson from Virginia Tech and Pardha Pyla from Bloomberg; Lulu for hosting the event; and the 20 plus members who came out. Thanks to all!

This was fun and informative. “Affordances and their Importance to UX Practitioners” was the title of the presentation. Rex and Pardha, joint authors of The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience, gave a great introduction to “affordances”, those aspects of the user experience that help, aid, or guide the user. This is such an important part of the user experience; it’s amazing that it is not covered sooner is their book. (It’s in chapter 20.) A few lucky members won free copies of the book – I know who I’m borrowing a copy from. Here’s an invitation to anyone who reads the book (or has read the book) – if you want to post your opinion of it or comments about it, I’ll post a blog entry here on my site – just submit it to me.

Lulu has a great facility on Hillsborough near the campus of NC State University. With the Irregardless Cafe providing the food, you couldn’t have a better hosted event!

During the question and answer period, there was talk about “Save” being a dying metaphor – why should the user have to click a button to perform a Save action, when the application should just take care of that? (as Google Docs handles edits of a page.) There was mention of Metro but this is new to me, so I’ll have to read up on this before I talk more about it. Since most of their examples of ‘affordances’ in the user interface were about buttons and levers and things to start an action or a task, I asked about affordances that indicate whether a task is complete or the status of the progress if something is loading or the user has to wait. Rex answered that this is covered in the book. He also mentioned that affordances can indicate what the next step should be for a user, if tasks are dependent or must be performed sequentially. This is definitely something I’m going to work on with the designers/developers at Paragon, where I work.

Bloomberg is also now hiring for multiple UX positions. See open positions here: www.bloomberg.com/ux/. If anyone is looking to hire a talented new grad, contact Mercedes Gosby and tell her Bill Albing sent you.

Offline to All-line
Once upon a time we talked about working “offline” as a way of saying that we were working on paper or in person, away from and apart from a computer. As more of our work moved to the computer (and we weren’t doing work if it wasn’t on the computer), “offline” began to mean working on your computer specifically, but disconnected from the rest of the Internet. We worked for years using the computer as an appliance that allowed us to work disconnected from everyone else and disconnected in silos of information.
I honestly can’t remember the last time anyone used the word “offline”. I don’t think people use that word much anymore. Not long ago you couldn’t work off your computer; now you can’t work without being connected.

Together We Work
Everyone’s work is collaborative these days; it all requires a connection to the Internet. More of my time is spent Web conferencing with others, Skyping with colleagues, doing Google searches, and doing other cloud activities. It seems only a short while ago we were talking about the day when we would be doing this at work. Now I don’t have time to catch my breath between online activities, work flowing from one collaborative engagement after another. I don’t know if we are in teams or knots. Sometimes it is one-on-one, sometimes it the entire team, sometimes it is open-ended and different people come and go.

Service or Infrastructure?
It was not that long ago that if you needed to upload a picture or have some service, you needed an account at that web site. You used to do most of your work in desktop applications and occasionally went to the Web for some information. Now I can upload pictures or get a Web address (URL) shortened without even logging in. No questions asked. I can get map information, I can find content at the most granular level, all without paying anyone or registering. I’m spending more of my time at Web sites and Web apps – and I don’t even know if there is a difference. Is it site (a place) or an application (a tool)? It’s both.
And it’s not just computers that are connected and allowing us to collaborate. We have phones and other mobile devices that allow us to stay connected in more places and more ways than we thought possible only a few years ago.

Distance is Gone
My brother gave me access to a document on Google; my colleagues at work used a spreadsheet in the cloud. Whether family or work, we are all moving into the cloud. No one asks ‘Should we work in the cloud?’; we are just in it. We are all working collaboratively. We are all working in the cloud.
Add to that the reach of collaboration – the fact that I’m Web conferencing with people all over the world and not even thinking about it; that we sometimes don’t even say where we are; that a gal from down the hall may be visiting a remote office and connecting in as if she’s at her desk; that half our company is not only remote but distributed geographically. I am connecting with more people in other countries using LinkedIn and Twitter and not even giving it a second thought.

Work or Play
I have an account with Amazon.com to sell books as a hobby. But Amazon has the online tools available for me to run it like a business. In fact, I do make money when I sell books that I have bought for cheap, either at thrift stores or yard sales. This is just one example of how the line is blurring of what is work and what is play. I connect with people around the world who buy my books; the tools are available in the cloud for me keep track of sales that are as sophisticated as any business would have – inventory tracking, order management, customer communication- it’s all there. And often when working in the cloud, the distinctions between work and play may only be whether you’re making enough money or not.

One Big Happy Cloud
Are we lost in a fog or immersed in a cloud? Eventually, I will get used to being so connected. But I’ll always be of the generation that made the transition, that started offline and began to see cracks in the silos until we were all mobile and all present with each other and collaborating in ways and on projects that we hadn’t even thought possible only a short time ago. I was born when there was time and distance, when people worked with things and computers handled information or metadata. Now we are all connecting and it’s not so clear where one project ends and another begins, if content has boundaries and if any limitations apply to what is possible.

Ever-Broadening Content Horizons
In her recent blog post ‘Content strategy – a revolution?’, Betty Tew is just touching the tip of the iceberg (or, whatever the equivalent in a cloud metaphor would be). I like how she refers to “the ever-broadening field of business and technical communications” because as I see it, tech writing (or technical communication) is becoming subsumed under larger circles in the Venn diagram of professional activities. It is still there and still important, but not the overarching discipline that it used to be. Silos that previously separated the specialties are going away. It’s time for us all to play together in the same space. Tech comm is playing a smaller part because more people want more types of information in more channels quicker. And no one has time to read it all, so we are working to automate part of the process and filter a lot of the content and design the interface so users don’t need so much explanation. So I think content strategy is part of the process of dealing with the disruption and change in our industry.

Challenge of Content Strategy
Last weekend I listened to Sarah O’Keefe’s webcast ‘Content strategy in technical communication’. When she got to the part where she asked the audience “What are YOUR challenges?”, I knew immediately – but I don’t think it is on her list of frequent responses. My biggest strategy challenge is not what amount or type of content to post or what format to deliver content, but how to build community, how to foster collaboration?
Content isn’t just something I create and send out to a willing audience. My strategy is to engage in conversation so content needs to flow both ways. Where in content strategy is any of that handled? Content strategy seems to focus on the content and the business value of content. But my customers do not need content (at least not content alone).
They need conversation. And how do you manage content once it is out there in social media, where others send it out, mix it up, create their own? When the conversation is happening and others join in, how does “content strategy” help?

How Separate?
I appreciate that Sarah wants so separate tech comm as a separate body of content with a different purpose from marketing communications and other more persuasive communications. It all might be blurring together and it might not be as useful as it was in the past to consider it as a separate type of content. Is segmenting persuasive comm. from tech. transfer useful? Let’s just say I’m not convinced yet. And talking about separate (but equal), can you really create a strategy for content that is separate from the rest of the company’s strategy? Is it really a separate process, a separate strategy? I’m wondering why we have content strategy as separate from sales strategy, service strategy, market strategy, product strategy, customer management strategy, etc.? Can anyone answer these questions for me?

Introduction
Last Thursday, I joined other local TriUPA members and listened to Josh Clark‘s webinar titled “Buttons are a Hack”. He ostensibly was trying to get us to do more with gestures and less with traditional windows controls, menus, and buttons in designing the interfaces for mobile devices. It’s not just the smaller size of screen that is motivating the change:
he really wants us to give users more direct interaction with the content. His webinar got a bunch of us thinking about trends in user interface design.

Call for Gestures
As an old guy who was just getting used to the existing computer interface conventions that were based on metaphors – folder, desktops, etc. – I found it refreshing but a bit scary. But, after all, a tablet (or other mobile device with appreciable screen estate) is somewhere between paper and computer, between phone and game console. With a touch screen, it deserves some rethinking of the user interaction.

So we are being advised to throw away all the silly stuff that we accept as convention; all those desktop metaphor controls are indirect and they are separating the user from the content and from their primitive bodily movements that have developed over thousands of years of evolution. Or at least, that’s what I heard.

Josh offered some pithy axioms:

• “Gestures are the keyboard shortcut of touch.”
• “Content is the control.”
• “Information is the interface.”

This sounds like a good starting point. Well, okay, I can see the direction this is going for mobile devices and touch screens. More thought is going to have to go into the design. He referred to LukeW.com for a reference guide of touch gestures.

Which gestures could be considered general or universal? You have swipe, tap, tap & hold, pinch, spread, etc. We could consider several finger touch (as some games do) but we may run into accessibility issues. We need to reduce the impact of Fitt’s law where at all possible. But we need to adopt some conventions so users don’t have to relearn the interface for each application.

Just Gestures
After some discussion on how we could discover gestures and how a user could learn gestures, he made the point that users will need to learn as they go. So as designers, we will have to introduce learning to the user without being in their face. He suggested we all look at how a player learns video games as a great example. With a more interactive interface we should follow these three ideas from gaming:

• Coaching – prompt the user if they look lost
• Leveling Up – introduce easy stuff at early levels and save complicated stuff for the expert
• Power Ups – provide shortcuts for expert users and ways to advance

I would like to add two additional ideas from gaming that came from a discussion with a colleague:

• managing inventory – let the interface save and organize your information
• key or reference – transitioning between rooms or levels there is always some map of terrain or point of reference, some metadata to help

Coaching Social
I would go further with the gamification insights, but I wonder if they exhaust the possibilities for learning. Most of the examples he gave were for games where I play against the computer or against other players but by myself. This still doesn’t handle collaboration and the social aspects that are needed for the growing amount of collaborative work. It doesn’t encourage or train you to work with others, even if it does provide incentives. As a rudimentary example, think of the skills you needed to drive on the highway. Part of the skill is controlling the car, but part of the skill is getting the right space between your car and the other cars; yielding or taking the right of way; keeping up with traffic. This is more than just learning the road signs and how to drive your car by yourself. It means learning how to work with others so that everyone arrives safely. Let’s see if the user interface can help with that as well.

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