Helping the world explore and understand content management and technical communication
As companies grapple with building and maintaining brand, and achieving sales and customer satisfaction objectives, they need to understand the key segments of their current and prospective customer bases. They user a persona template to collect the data and formulate a picture of a real customer or user to drive their design or messaging decisions. Continue reading ...
The language on the TurboTax website was reassuring to me. I felt a connection. Like I could trust Intuit. Language in a user interface is important to make users feel comfortable, confident, and successful. Continue reading ...
It’s your first car, and you love how it drives. An icon appears on the dash with a bright orange exclamation point. What does this mean? You panic. Is something overheated? Is the engine going to explode? Continue reading ...
Content continues to be increasingly important in customer purchasing decisions, and technical communicators, marketing professionals, and product developers focus more of their efforts on customer satisfaction. To this end, the first annual Customer Experience Recognition Awards (CERAs) will be held during Information Development World on October 23rd, 2014, in San Jose, California. Continue reading ...
Noz Urbina advocates a strong link between innovation and great experience throughout the customer lifecycle via content management. His Lavacon 2012 session focused on providing specific audiences the customer experience they want by mapping deliverables to the customer lifecycle. Continue reading ...
Where do you go to find answers? Google? Yeah, so does everyone else (including your users). Paul Mueller of UserAid knows this fact and stressed the need for a one-stop-shop approach for help content in his talk at WritersUA. “Users only want to go to one place to find answers,” said Mueller. A common approach to having your help content be “Google-able” is to take the help files and throw them up on the web so that users can find them through a Google search. But why should the user have to figure out where to find the info they need and sort through it all? Decide what your customers need and deliver it in one integrated solution Continue reading ...
IBM’s Michael Hughes opened his first session of the WritersUA conference, Embedding User Experience in the Product Development Life Cycle, by provoking the audience members to show how they add value and get involved in the four stages of product development: Defining Requirements, Design and Validation, Development and Testing, and Deployment and Support. Continue reading ...
Adam Polansky, recognized as a founding pioneer in the field of information architecture (IA), is an unusual mix of eclectic tactician and IA visionary. Before he entered the IT world, Adam had variously been a member of the military, an illustrator for an advertising agency, and a retail manager, among other roles. Lois Patterson sat down with Adam Polansky at LavaCon to talk information architecture, empathy, user experience & goals for technical communications projects. Continue reading ...
Corey Ganser presented a thoughtful session about the importance of engaging technical writers and customer support agents with the goal of decreasing support costs and increasing client satisfaction. Three stakeholders in the question of who cares about content are the company, the customers, and you (the technical communicator). During his session, he explained how his employer, Mindtouch, forged relationships with its customers and found opportunities for selling its products and services Continue reading ...