STC Rochester Spectrum 2019

The internet has significantly changed workplace teams. Do you use email, instant messaging, online meetings, or discussion boards to collaborate or communicate with coworkers? Congratulations, you’re part of a virtual team! However, the dynamics of these teams are different and the methodologies organizations use today don’t meet the needs of a distributed, diverse, and international workforce. But you can improve the situation by joining us in this session to learn what others are doing and share your own experiences and suggestions. The speaker has been a virtual worker and manager for over 8 years and understands virtual team issues and opportunities. He will present challenges and solutions to change the experience from frustrating to positive and also guide a frank group discussion. The old rules don’t apply to virtual teams, so join us to learn new rules (and which to break). You and your teammates will be glad you did

User experience includes every interaction people have with a company and its products...from opening the box to setting up and using the product. When it comes to using an app to interact with a product, the visual and written content on the screens must work together seamlessly to deliver a simple and delightful experience.

If MSWord is your content creation platform, you likely spend a lot of time emailing files for review, hunting for the correct version of your files, and compiling changes to content that are submitted by reviewers. And, you probably spend even more time transforming and styling content to other formats for multichannel delivery to your customers. Yet, you want to publish your content to cool websites and keep them updated regularly. Join this session to see a demonstration of how structured authoring using XML and a Component Content Management System can make the magic happen and relieve hours, days, or even weeks of time from your content delivery processes.

Information 4.0 promises to revolutionize technical communication, just as online help and the web did. And, as with online help and the web, there will be mistakes along the way. Exploring those mistakes to see what lessons we can learn for the future is the focus of this presentation. We’ll look at mistakes in areas like justification to management, misunderstandings in terminology and technology, and others, illustrated with real examples (unfortunately) like “RoboCop” and “HLMT”. We’ll then look at how these mistakes might recur under Information 4.0 and how to avoid them. The goal? Don’t repeat past mistakes while moving into the future.

Rule one in writing: Know your audience. Project analysis begins with building a reader profile. With a proper reader profile, writing to an audience becomes easy. The message is specific, and needs can be anticipated. By using this method, your documentation will increase product value and customer loyalty. In today’s evolving world, the audience never stays the same. Needs change over time, new types of members emerge with every product release, and technology changes the way audiences expect to interact with documentation. Have you talked to Alexa lately? Fortunately, with advanced HTML5 outputs that use Google Analytics, technical writers...