I’m utterly failing in my attempt to make this a weekly feature on this site. Maybe I should cut it down a little, thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Writing an Interface Style Guide
Some handy tips for what to include in any user interface guidelines document:

Interface style guides are extremely useful to define best practices for design and development. However, keeping that information updated and functional is imperative. A glossary, an index, references, acknowledgments, etc., are among some of the supplementary details you can add to make the style guide as helpful as possible.

A Climate of Fear among Technical Communicators?
Prompted by a panel in the recent STC Summit, Ben Minson outlines some basic tenets of employment which, whilst we all know them, bear being repeated:

I think protection lies in being inventive. If management and your peers see that you go beyond the bare minimum and the mediocre because you’re interested in what you’re doing, they’ll see value. If you invent in order to solve problems and to benefit your team and the organization, they’ll see value.

Interestingly, this aspect of professional life raises some issues, some of which were encountered by Anne Gentle at the STC 2008 Summit.

STC2008 - Wrap up STC Summit trip report
Anne heard a couple of similar issues during the summit (as well as a lot of other great stuff), but she noted that:

proving that [an] idea needs to be implemented in the first place means understanding how to convince management of the value.

It seems to be something we all struggle with, providing ROI to back up our reasoning behind choices of tool and technology. Which brings me neatly to the next post…

What is the Best Metric to Measure the Success of Your Reuse of DITA Topics?
Of course you’ll have to have provided enough evidence to at least get a pilot project or proof of concept off the ground, but if you have, how do you get the most from the data you are capturing. Bill Hackos suggests you should measure the percentage of repository words that are reused in context:

The ratio of the repository content to the produced content metric works at the content level rather than at the topic level. This metric is proportional to actual costs because translation is charged by the word, and maintenance costs are proportional to the volume of content rather than to the number of topics.

I’m not a huge fan of such quantitative measures but sometimes needs must. The article mentions some other possible metrics, and if you are considering a single source rollout give it a look as it will spark some thoughts I’m sure.

Finally a couple of quick links that do exactly what they say on the tin:

• Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows
• Open Source Application - Word Counter
• Find and keep all your user guides

The last week or so I’ve been pulling together a strategy presentation.

Backwards.

It all started when I realised that I need a place to dump some thoughts and concepts, things I knew were related but didn’t know how or why. Most of these were simple diagrams, or short sentences. I’m not sure why I choose powerpoint, I guess I knew that at some point I’d need to present these ideas as a cohesive whole.

So without planning it I soon had a batch of somewhat related slides, but which had no audience and certainly no idea of structure or story.

The slides include diagrams of how we are planning on storing our content once we have chunked it all into topics, quotes around the changing role information is playing in the workplace and as part of the product set, details of our current build system and how it needs to improve, lists of metadata, analyst suggestions with implementation ideas of how we can put them into action, thoughts on the change of writing style required to move to topic-based authoring, and so on and so forth.

It’s a big grab bag of everything and anything that we’ve thought about, or will need to consider as we change both how we work, and what we do for the company. I’m pretty confident it will be something we can re-use over and over again, shuffling the slides in and out depending on the audience, and I’m certain it will prove worthwhile both internally and externally.

Mind you I’ve just realised that there is one word that doesn’t feature as strongly as it should. Conversation. That will come as soon as I start to add in some thoughts around the developer community website I’m currently building (which in turn has reminded me to beef up the training material angle.. ack!).

What’s really encouraging is that, despite the unconventional approach it’s all starting to make some sense as a cohesive whole, and I think the range of information it covers will help us focus in on various things we’ve not fully considered (or considered at all) and once we’ve done that it will only take a bit of slimming down to be ideal for communicating our plans to the rest of the company.

Typically when thinking of planning I start to think in more traditional terms, breaking down the work needed into actionable chunks. However this time I let my mind race and wander across all the myriad of topics that it needed to consider, captured as much information as I could and it’s only now that I’m starting to step back and survey what I’ve created.

As a process it’s a bit ramshackle but sometimes it’s good to step off the well-worn path and try something new. So next time you are considering future plans and strategies, why not start them backwards?