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STC Chocolate Chapter Celebrates 10 Years
The STC TransAlpine Chapter’s 10th Anniversary Conference in Vienna (8-10 June 2009) brought together technical communicators from across Europe for a 3 day “orgy” of learning, chocolate, networking, chocolate, ice-cream, and more chocolate. This was surely one of the most fulfilling professional conferences I’ve ever attended – in every sense of the word!
Following a two-year hiatus, the STC TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) has a new and enthusiastic leadership team and a loyal membership of around 150 members from Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Italy, and beyond. To celebrate the chapter’s renewal, their 10th anniversary conference in Vienna provided a full day of workshops and two days of educational sessions. The event provided plenty of opportunity for discussion and exchange, fuelled by copious amounts of coffee, chocolate, ice-cream, and other calorific Viennese specialties.
Tom Johnson (of idratherbewriting.com fame) was the conference’s star attraction. With over 100 podcasts and 250 blog posts on technical writing to his name, Tom is one of the most prolific and well-respected voices in the business. I’ve been a casual subscriber of Tom’s blog for several years, though now that I’ve met him in person I’m already well on my way to becoming a devoted follower.
Tom’s workshop on Monday focused on getting started with the WordPress blogging tool. While I’m no stranger to WordPress (I blog regularly as part of my job and recently helped implement an intranet blogging solution for my company using WordPressMu, the multi-user version of WordPress), Tom’s workshop was full of practical advice and his enthusiasm has got me all motivated to have another crack at launching my own personal blog.
Tom shared the names of some of his favorite bloggers and podcasters to illustrate the best practices he described during his workshop:
- Penelope Trunk – The Brazen Careerist
- David Pogue – NY Times columnist
- Heather B. Armstrong – A “mommy blogger”
- Writer River – a tech comm social news site
- Ira Glass – This American Life
- Alistair Christy – a Scottish guy who likes to podcast about tech writing while out walking his dog
If you too are looking for some inspiration for your own blog or podcasts, these sites could be a good place to start. You should also definitely check out Tom’s blog (where you’ll find Tom’s own insightful review of the TAC conference) and his extensive podcast series Techwriter Voices.
Tom recently ran a fun cartoon caption contest on his blog (which he dubbed the Twelve Days of Christmas in June), with some great prize giveaways including free copies of Camtasia Studio and Author-IT.
If you missed out on Tom’s contest, and especially if you’re a cat lover, you might want to check out icanhascheezburger.com instead for more crazy caption fun (warning: Cats cannot spell, and their grammar is dubious at best. They’re also obsessed by “cheezburgers”).
Ellis Pratt from UK-based technical writing services company Cherryleaf, also made a great contribution to the conference, with a comprehensive three-hour career development workshop. Ellis first explored emerging trends in our profession and identified areas where today’s technical writers could position themselves to better take advantage of these trends. He insisted on the importance of measuring and communicating the value of what we do to our colleagues and to management.
Ellis provided practical guidelines and techniques for identifying gaps in the market and explained how to develop a unique selling proposition to differentiate oneself from the competition. He ended with a look at the basics of networking and some tips for using Google and other tools for quickly locating job opportunities online.
Tom was back on Tuesday morning and delighted us all with his highly informative session on developing effective quick reference guides. Most technical writers are only too aware that few users are prepared to sit and read through a 50-page (or even a 10-page) manual before attempting to get to grips with a new product or piece of software, no matter how much work has gone into it. However, by condensing the essential information users need to do their job into one or two pages and making it attractive to read and easy to understand, a reference guide can have a dramatic impact on user satisfaction and productivity. Tom claims to have seen user’s faces literally light up when presented with one of his two-page reference guides.
While quick reference guides can’t always replace a full-blown user manual, a quick reference sheet certainly communicates the idea of simplicity (“Two pages? How hard could it be?”) and provides users with an easy starting point for learning a new tool. While advanced users might be the only ones to venture into the full documentation, a quick reference guide can be used to layer information effectively and get new users up to speed quickly.
Tom commented several examples of good and bad approaches to quick reference guides and shared a ton of practical tips and advice on getting started. He explained how he now develops quick reference guides for just about every project he works on. I think he did a good job of convincing everyone in the room to do the same!
On Tuesday morning, David Farbey shared some startling statistics from a recent study carried out for a UK firm called The TechGuys. In this study, over two-thirds of people said they don’t get full use of their gadgets because they couldn’t understand the instructions, about a third said they often avoid the manual altogether, preferring trial and error, and around 28% of people claimed they often ended up throwing the manual across the room or taking their frustrations out on the piece of equipment they were trying to set up! David Crystal provides additional commentary on this study in his blog post, On read rage, and provides some explanation as to why manuals for products like mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets are so frustrating for users.
Hanna Risku, head of the department for Knowledge and Communications Management at the Danube University in Krems, Austria, then provided a fascinating insight into the value of cognitive science for technical communication and insisted on the need for usability research and testing to take a more important role in the product development cycle. Hanna made a very convincing case, and I’m sure all technical communicators could benefit from a solid grounding in cognitive science theory and practice.
For Tuesday’s final session, I joined David Farbey, Hanna Risku, CJ Walker, and Tom Johnson for a panel discussion focused on emerging and future trends in technical communication, moderated by Vici Koster-Lenhardt, TAC’s Communications Manager.
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We discussed the increasing influence of social media and networking tools on information delivery. David saw social media tools as an interesting way for writers to enter into more direct contact with their users. At the same time, these technologies have the potential to profoundly affect our profession. If we’re not able to ride this wave, we may soon find ourselves all washed up!
In today’s tough economic climate, more than ever, we must not content ourselves with just “helping” users. We need to make sure we are having a direct and measurable impact on our company’s “bottom line.” And we need to make sure we communicate that value clearly.
Another conclusion of the panel was that things are moving so fast these days that we are often confronted with sudden changes in our professional or personal environment, perhaps as the result of company merger or acquisition, relocation to another state, country or continent, or of finding oneself on the job market after many years working for the same company. Rather than gradually developing our skills to take advantage of some gradually developing trend, we are often required to suddenly reinvent ourselves almost overnight. For example, my company was recently acquired by IBM. I’m looking forward to getting to know my 280,000 new colleagues while busily trying to identify a new career path within “Big Blue.”
All the panelists agreed that the best protection against this kind of sudden change in circumstances is having a rich and well-rounded set of skills and experience to draw upon. As CJ Walker put it, there is a big difference between having 15 years of experience and having 1 year of experience repeated 15 times!
Participating in the panel was a very rewarding experience for me and I think, collectively, we were able to pinpoint and explore some key areas where we could all improve our skills and employability. As a result, I know I’m not the only one planning to update my resumé in the near future! The May issue of Intercom (available to STC members only) includes more insight into the future of technical communication
The conference was by no means all work and no play. Coffee breaks, lunch and dinner each evening provided opportunities to develop new connections and friendships, while sampling some delicious Viennese cuisine. Our visit to a traditional Heuriger wine tavern in Grinzing on the outskirts of Vienna for dinner on Tuesday evening was a case in point. After all, it’s not often you get to share the same table with library scientists from Slovenia, information designers from Poland, podcasters from Utah, or technical writers from Copenhagen, Munich and Milan. This diversity is one of the TAC’s defining characteristics (together with their obsession for chocolate) and these moments of informal cross-cultural exchange were as much a highlight of the conference for me as the educational sessions themselves.
A small, brave, break-away group of us, including Tom, managed a midnight excursion to Vienna’s famous ferris wheel in the Prater fun park. Despite that, Tom was still in fine form next morning to kick off the final day of the conference with a fascinating session on blogging, podcasting and screencasting. Tom recorded the session on his way cool H4 Zoom digital recorder and has already published it as a podcast on his website.
As luck would have it, the last two sessions of the conference were both presented by future colleagues of mine, Anna Haberko and Katarzyna Kostorz, two young and talented information designers from IBM’s software lab in Cracow, Poland. Anna and Katarzyna presented two very different topics, though both talks served to further underline the multi-disciplinary nature of our profession.
Katarzyna presented two case studies that showed how technical writers can take on the role of interaction designers and improve the usability and intuitiveness of user interfaces while reducing the amount of documentation required to guide users through their tasks. One example she described saw the documentation of a software application reduced from 24 pages to just 250 words following a few simple improvements to the user interface. Another example saw a 24-step procedure reduced to just four steps. Katarzyna explained that while the user interface changes meant more work for the developers involved in the project, the improvements made a big difference in the usability of the application. Conclusion: A good grounding in user experience theory and practice can provide technical writers with significant added value.
Anna’s presentation described how documentation teams can make use of competitive analysis techniques, more commonly used by sales and marketing departments, to compare their documentation to that of similar or competing products. Anna provided a clear methodology for conducting the analysis, including how to assemble the workgroup, create a charter, research best practices, identify competitors and acquire their documentation, perform the evaluation and then analyze the results to identify relative strengths and weaknesses of their documentation deliverables.
Anna went on to describe a second “Industry Landscape” study where her team identified the “market differentiators” of their documentation deliverables and positioned them relative to the competition on a Gartner Quadrant diagram. The Gartner Quadrant is a commonly used technique for competitive analysis but one that I have personally never seen applied to documentation before.
During the final session of the conference, we worked in groups to identify our key takeaways from the event and everyone shared three things they would do in the next week to apply what they had learned. My list included re-connecting with Anna and Katarzyna upon my return to Paris and exploring the results of their work further (two down, 279,998 to go!) I also promised myself to listen to at least one of Tom’s podcasts (check!) and to write this conference report for the STC France and TAC newsletters (check!)
The conference would not have been complete, however, without the traditional TAC chocolate raffle. All attendees had been encouraged to bring a sample of chocolate from their own country and purchase raffle tickets from Giampiero for 1 euro each. Everyone’s chocolate was then grouped into various lots of increasing size that sat tantalizingly at the back of the conference room until the end of the final day. TAC president CJ Walker drew the tickets and called the winners and by some miracle (or was it destiny?) I came away with the top prize: A 1.5 Kg bag of individually-wrapped Swiss chocolate miniatures and the biggest bar of Toblerone I’ve ever seen!
Champagne, ice-cream (and more chocolates) were on hand to help us celebrate the end to a wonderful conference and drink a toast to the great team of people who helped make the event possible, including ITL, the conference sponsor, who donated the meeting room (and Nespresso machine).
I left for the airport with my heart full of thanks, my belly full of ice-cream, my head spinning with inspiration (or was that the champagne?), and my suitcase full of … chocolate. What Else?!