Program Report

Special Interest Night

By Anne Louiselle

	Special Interest Night Moderator Steve Jong
	Photo by Anne Louiselle

On February 20, 2002, the Boston Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication hosted a Special Interest Night. The meeting was hosted by Steve Jong and featured speakers Nan Fritz, Char James-Tanny, Joyce Goldstein, Jim Siwila, and Averill Bromfield.

Averill Bromfield, AVEnet Services:
Touch Engines and Leverage Velocity

Averill Bromfield of AVEnet Services said "a new customer must see or hear from you a minimum of seven instances before they will make a decision to purchase your services or products."

This marketing tidbit provided the basis for the company’s Touch Engine Program. He describes Leverage Velocity, part of the Touch Engine process, as a practice in which each piece of collateral must leverage another piece of collateral to be fully effective.

Averill Bromfield of AVEnet Services
Photo by Anne Louiselle

The development of a Touch Engine is a six-step process. "The first step is to educate your customers and prospects," Bromfield said. "You must continually describe how you can solve their problems and how they can benefit from your solutions. The second step is to captivate their attention by making your material entertaining. The third step is to Leverage Velocity. The fourth step is to use repetition with your prospects by providing additional information, either through electronic media (Web, newsletters, e-mail) or via telephone contact or via meetings. The fifth step involves two-way communication, asking questions in written or electronic collateral, resulting in feedback and response. The sixth step is follow-up with live customer interaction. Great collateral material can lose its momentum without strong follow-up contact."

Nan Fritz, Associate Fellow, former Chapter president, and founder of nSight:
Peer Editing

Nan Fritz believes peer editors can make important contributions. "A fellow writer who understands technology and can serve as a technical reviewer can improve the accuracy of the document. If there is no formally trained editor, a fellow reviewer can spot egregious errors," said Fritz.

Fritz has some specific recommendations about peer editing. She suggests defining what the review process will cover and how much time it will take. "Use standard ways of communicating recommendations, use checklists, and always be prepared to defend your changes," she said. "Avoid marking up with red ink, and meet to discuss changes. Remember, writers are people with feelings, like everyone else."

Peer review can improve presentation and effectiveness. For instance, Fritz suggests that the document should be examined for active voice, tone, transitions, jargon, wordiness, repetition, and sentence length and variation. "With training, a fellow reviewer can often make a valuable contribution," said Fritz.

Joyce Goldstein, President of the Massachusetts Chapter of the International Society for Performance Improvement:
Instructional Design

Joyce Goldstein, president of the Boston Chapter of ISPI
Photo by Anne Louiselle

According to Joyce Goldstein, instructional design is the systematic development of instructional specifications using learning and instructional theory to ensure the quality of instruction. "You must focus on the outcome. If you don’t measure where you are going, you’ll get somewhere else," Goldstein said.

Goldstein suggests writing a learning objective, a statement of the items that the learner should be able to accomplish after completing the materials. Goldstein’s A-B-C-Ds of writing learning objectives offers some specifics on this.

"A is for audience. Ask yourself, who are your intended learners? What do you know about them? What do they already know?" she said. " B is for behaviors. What do you want the learner to be able to do afterward? C is for conditions. Ask yourself, under what circumstances or constraints will the task be performed? D is for degree. How well should the learner be able to do? Consider the level of ability displayed upon completion."

Char James-Tanny, President of JTF Associates:
Indexing Online Help

"There are five different types of navigation in online documentation: the table of contents, the full-text search, browse buttons, hyperlinks, and indexes. According to usability studies, well-designed indexes are the preferred means of navigation," said Char James-Tanny.

In her opinion, there are three important points to remember when indexing online Help. The first is to use synonyms. "Teach the users your jargon and make sure you acknowledge theirs," she said. The second is to use nouns as index entries and limit the use of verbs. The third is to spell-check and proofread.

Jim Siwila, Documentation Manager, Sun Microsystems:
Exploring Approaches to Documenting Procedures for GUIs

Jim Siwila of Sun Microsystems
Photo by Anne Louiselle

Jim Siwila presented several approaches to writing procedures for tasks that are performed with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Among those he examined is a method developed at Sun Microsystems for documenting system management applications. The online documentation, or help, for those applications is integrated into the interface, and instead of providing a step-by-step procedure of an entire task, the online help guides the user through the interface one step at a time.

"Instead of procedural documentation, we present information to the user automatically as it is relevant to the user's place in the interface." Siwila said. "Steps appear as pointers to the next screen or the next phase of the task. When the user gets to that next screen or phase, new information is presented, including a pointer to the next step if appropriate."

Siwila has found that the method of guiding the user from screen to screen through the interface works well for the type of interface that Sun has in the management applications because it uses a lot of dialog boxes. "I do question whether this approach would work as well for applications that are like palettes, such as word processors," he said. Siwila used the help system from Sun's StarOffice to illustrate how traditional step-by-step procedures may provide a better approach to documenting tasks in palettelike applications. "In those types of applications, the screen-by-screen method used in the system management applications is harder to apply," he said.

When asked about the resources required to write the small, modular pieces of information that became integrated into the system management application interface, Siwila said, "because it is a change in approach, it will take more time initially, but writers will eventually become as efficient as they were at writing conventional books and online help."

Siwila also said, "Integrating information into the interface does require a lot of coordination with, and cooperation from, the engineering and human factors teams. Writers need to be involved in design, and they were intimately involved in the original design at Sun that developed the mechanisms for integrating information in the interface."

View the Special Interest Night photo gallery.

Anne Louiselle can be reached at alouiselle@attbi.com.