The Meeting

The meeting was held at FIAP Jean Monnet (Paris 14), which has become our regular meeting place. As usual, those coming directly from work met in the bar area and then went into the self-service restaurant for an early dinner together. 

The meeting started at 8:00pm, and because we were a small group, the session was quite interactive, with the presentation about STC's Region 2 Conference serving as support for discussion.

The Region 2 Conference

France Chapter Treasurer and Acting Secretary, Ellen Lebelle, presented the report on the STC Region 2 Conference that took place in London in October. She also directed us to additional articles that are available from the STC UK chapter website. A selection of presentations from the conference are also available from the STC France Chapter website for download.

---

Before discussing the content of the conference, I thought STC France members should know just how much our chapter contributed to its success. The chapter contributed €1000 seed money. Jennifer O Neill and I were part of the organizing committee and worked very hard on getting sponsors and managing speakers. We also worked together on the brochure. All this hard work certainly paid off. Not only did we get a lot of satisfaction out of helping to organize such a successful conference, but the seed money that we invested has already been returned and we are expecting to receive an additional €1500 as the remaining funds are shared among the organizing chapters. We will be putting this extra money to good use in the coming year to help improve and subsidize our own program of member events.

For my part, among the presentations that impressed me the most were:

• Patrick Hofmann's ROI of usability and information design. You can say a lot without words, but you need your word skills to pare down your message to the point that an illustration is the only requirement and says all you need. He presented 3 case studies, but the one that left the longest impression was the first; he turned a full online help project into a single screen "poster". His customers were not convinced it would do the job, but by the end of a month's trial, their customer was so happy with the savings they had achieved, they ordered a second machine.

• Nad Rosenberg and her Do-It-Yourself Tools. Nad runs a small agency in the Philadelphia area and started to develop billing tools to spend less time and hassle on her accounting work and to be able to spread out her billing over the course of a project. As her agency grew, she added tracking tools for her staff and customers. These tools are greatly appreciated by all and have essentially locked in her customers. But, what impressed me, was how much you learn by doing it yourself. For the more sophisticated tools, Nad hired a programmer, but because of her own experience, she knew precisely what she needed from the programmer.

• James Lawrence and his Business within a Business. James works for McAfee in England. He is the TechPubs manager and a self-declared paranoid. He suspects that others would like to do away with TechPubs - split the work among other departments, outsource, offshore, ... So, he has developed a business plan with a SWOT analysis and a roadmap, treating his TechPubs department as if it were an independent company contracting its services to a client. It has added value to the TechPubs department; they have become more visible to the rest of the company and their work is recognized.

• Geoff Hart and his case study for re-engineering in which he described how the organization he works for improved their time-to-publication and improved their documents by a thorough audit of the processes in place and the collaborative plan to change those processes. They used the Kaizen method of change management. This method achieves consensus and, once in place, encourages continuous change.

I attended other presentations, too. In the session with Derek Torres and Stuart Mudie (both STC France Chapter members, by the way), I came away with the conclusion that I wouldn't rush into Windows Vista, although when I get a new computer, I have no need to fear it. The new version of Microsoft Word/Office looks interesting. Noz Urbina, of Mekon, Ltd., spoke about the use of XML throughout the company.

There are also several presentations that I was unable to attend that were reviewed in the STC UK chapter's November newsletter, which you can find on their website (http://www.stcuk.org/newsletters/Nov2006/).

--- 

World Usability Day - An Exercise in Card Sorting

France Chapter Immediate Past President and Webmaster, Stuart Culshaw, ended the evening with a quick summary of the web-based card sorting event that had been organized by STC as part of World Usability Day (WUD) on November 14.

Card sorting is a technique in which users are asked to group together sets of related terms that can help information architects and usability experts to identify underlying structures within related information and better understand how users relate to this information. In a traditional card sorting exercise, keywords, such as a list of concepts or tasks, are written on cards and the participants are asked to put these cards into groups and name the groups.

The STC usability SIG who piloted the card-sorting exercise for WUD wanted to get as many people as possible from around the world involved in the event and for this they decided to use some web-based software that allows users to accomplish the same card-sorting task online using their browser. Stuart gave a quick demonstration of the WebSort software (http://websort.net/ ). The topic chosen for the STC card sort for World Usability Day was "Weather" and over 500 participants from around the world took part. A detailed analysis and report will be published by STC as soon as the data has been analyzed.

Among other things that piqued Stuart's interest was investigating how the French participants could communicate during the meeting. We organized it as a "virtual" meeting so that non-Paris-centered members could join in. He discovered a n interesting web-based flash tool for meetings. More about that in the near future!

The meeting adjourned at 10:15pm.