What Went Down at WritersUA

by Fei Min Lorente, Volunteer Co-ordinator / Education Manager

The WritersUA Conference aims to provide the most comprehensive and timely information specifically designed for user assistance professionals. It was held in Seattle this year-lovely city. Great shopping, great restaurants, wonderful service, and it didn't rain nearly as much as was forecast. Oh, and the conference was fascinating, too.

Being focused on user assistance, the conference had an advanced technical bent, from trends in communication, to the latest tools and technologies, to new methodologies. I don't need to bore you with a description of all the sessions; you can get that here.

Here are some of the highlights...

The opening session speaker, Scott McLeod, documented Google's Chrome browser using a comic book format. It was a fascinating process, and clearly a creative way to convey complex information, but it was hardly applicable to the run-of-the-mill documentation project. However, Scott made two pertinent points:

• The comic strip concept is excellent for showing sequence and eliminating excess noise, which keeps information to the point
• You can achieve the same effect as a comic strip by using a series of graphics or a flow chart. Not like this article at all. If I had better graphical skills (and were less prone to digressions), I would have drawn it as a comic instead.

Another keynote speaker was Mary Jo Foley, a professional Microsoft watcher and journalist. The audience enjoyed her on-stage interview because everyone has opinions about MS, and to make matters a bit more interesting, a group of MS employees were attending the conference. Mary Jo provided interesting insights into how MS has changed since Bill left most of the day-to-day operations to Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie. For more information on the subject, see her blog.

The closing speaker was Jared Spool, full-time user interface engineer and part-time magician. He incorporated magic tricks into his presentation and used them as an analogy for a good user interface:

• Use illusions to delight your customers (but don't forget that the product really has to work, too)
• It's all in the perception; if a customer can complete her task on your web site, she'll think it's faster.

He was a great presenter who kept us entertained and awake at the end of a busy four days.

The sessions I attended were partly selected out of interest, and partly because I knew that the speaker was good. I was never disappointed there; the presentation quality was impressive. As for hot topics, DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is still popular, and by extension, XML (Extensible Markup Language) and CMS (Content Management Systems). AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is an up and coming web-based help, and many technical communicators are involved with interface design. The most fascinating information for me was the future trends based on how people communicate now. There were several sessions on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, blogs, wikis, and Twitter. They had Twitter going throughout the conference with free WiFi internet access in all the meeting rooms. There was a lot of discussion about how to use these new media, and what the implications were for people, both users and creators of content. And the big players-Google, Microsoft and Adobe-made their presence known, if only because everyone was talking about them.

Yes, WritersUA was a satisfying dose of tech comm geekiness. Thanks to Joe Welinski, the conference organizer, for giving me the opportunity to attend and participate. I hope to be at another WritersUA conference in the future.

About Fei Min Lorente

Fei Min Lorente (feimin.lorente@onsemi.com) is a senior member of STC, and a Senior Technical Communicator at the medical division of ON Semiconductor. Her work experience encompasses technical communication in the database, banking, automated pipeline control, and defense industries. She maintains a fondness for software and considers herself a programming dilettante.