Content is King: TWIA Conference Report

November 2015

The annual TWIA* conference was held in Melbourne this year for the first time. At the customary Sydney venue, the conference normally attracts around 40 to 50 technical communicators – this year it attracted nearly 70 and the organisers even had to turn away last-minute registrations! Apparently a considerable number of participants were non-members of TWIA, so word of the conference and TWIA’s activities is clearly getting around the Victorian tech comms community! Steve Moss and Sue Woolley reporting on proceedings.

Conference organiser extraordinaire Janet Taylor and her small team presented a line-up of thought-provoking presentations with Lana Brindley setting the scene with her presentation on Content as the driver of change. Lana is senior manager of the Rackspace Private Cloud documentation team and explored how content has changed through history – starting with cave paintings and finishing with today’s democratised web. Her theme was that we have moved from the challenges of creating content to the challenges of organising and curating content. An inspiring viewpoint and a great start to the conference!

Mainstay of numerous TechCommNZ conferences, Tony Self, reprised his 2014 TechCommNZ conference presentation on Choosing the right path. Presented with his usual light-hearted touch, his canter through the rise of mobile devices, and the introduction of Google Glass, responsive web design, ePub, eInk, augmented reality and a range of other technologies that were science fiction ten years ago, made fascinating listening. How do we ensure that the content we create is future proofed so that we don’t have to rework it whenever a new technology arrives – Tony’s suggestions included actively innovating, revising our approaches and letting go of preconceptions as well as embracing the new technologies where possible. His presentation was provocative – a definite wake-up call for all tech communicators to make sure that they stay relevant as technological change alters the way that people communicate and use information.

Telling us how to Generate content from source code, Grant Noble from RSA (the security division of EMC) explained how his team used the open source Doxygen tool to create API (Application Programming Interface) and developer guide material directly from source code comments. He discussed how this approach helped ensure that the documentation was consistent with the functionality of the source code, and how his team worked with the developers to ensure that the comments were of suitable quality. Grant demonstrated that developers can help tech communicators create valuable documentation, without too many tears on either side!

Rhonda Bracey suggested a range of powerful techniques that would Save time and sanity: increase your efficiency with Microsoft Word. As a long-time Word user and editor of very large documents, Rhonda’s handy tips were based on a great deal of experience with ironing out the wrinkles from documents produced by a range of non-expert Word users.

It was great to see the incomparable Dave Gash back at this year’s conference. This year he delivered two presentations: A painless introduction to information typing and Safe web fonts: here at last. He illustrated the value of information typing by using a range of examples based on the three DITA information types: Concept, Task and Reference. His point was that the reader will benefit from the author’s efforts to present ‘like with like’, in information terms. In his second presentation, Dave outlined two methods for ensuring that users can access the required fonts from your website, by using the CSS @font-face rule. While both presentations were technically valuable, Dave’s delivery ensured that the audience also found them hugely entertaining.

As we know, content is not always just about written content. Users need a range of tools to learn new products, get familiar with using them and troubleshoot problems. In his presentation, Developing video-based tutorials for WorkFlowMax, Steve Moss described his experience with developing help content, courses and screencasts for the WorkFlowMax job management software. One of the main take-aways from Steve’s very interesting presentation was that while we should probably get professional help for graphics, animations, videos and voice overs, our tech communication skills are definitely highly valuable for adapting to course development and screencasting. It also takes time to do well; Steve mentioned that it may take a day to produce a quality one-minute screencast.

Kylie Weaver and Alon Hadass explored whether content is really king in their presentation, Deliberate content. Kylie and Alon talked about PAD (Purpose, Audience Delivery) and COWE (Collect, Organise, Write, Edit). PAD applies to the context of the content development. Once the purpose, audience and delivery have been clearly defined, the writing process can commence.

The culmination of the presentation was when Kylie threw her hands in the air, announcing COWE PAD!!!! The take-away from this engaging presentation was that, in Kylie and Alon’s view, Context is King, not content.

In his presentation Customer feedback from zero to maximum, John Wilson presented a case study on how his team at MYOB have used customer feedback to drive radical changes to the way the documentation is delivered. By looking carefully at usage analytics and adapting their documentation development processes to be a closer fit to the software development methods used at MYOB, John and his team have dramatically turned around their customer’s approval ratings for their documentation.

Andrew Lockton’s presentation: Customising Word’s Interface to Increase Authoring Efficiency, followed on from where Rhonda Bracey’s session left off. Andrew showed some of the ways that Word can be customised to support the kinds of work performed by technical communicators, even though Word appears to have been designed for users with basic ‘entry level skills’. He ran through the steps required to optimise the status bar, Quick Access Toolbar, Building Blocks, Ribbon and macros to provide a much more efficient working environment.

If you were in any doubt about the value of plain English, Kylie Weaver’s presentation Get active with Plain English would have rapidly dispelled them. She began outlining the reasons that plain English should be used and what happens when it isn’t. To ensure that your readers get the most from what you write, she discussed the use of active voice and ways you can keep your writing clear, concise, simple, specific and inclusive. More importantly, her presentation reflected these attributes – making it delightfully easy to follow and understand.

The benefits of single-sourcing (or component content management, as it’s also called) were laid bare in Neil Woolley’s Introduction to single sourcing. Neil explained how his company, Knowledgedoc, uses Author-it as the basis for developing their single-sourced documentation and training material, and gave examples of how the technique can be used to save development and maintenance effort.

Going beyond the basic analytics was the theme of Georgina Laidlaw’s presentation on Finding meaningful stats to support your content strategy. She started by looking at the information returned by Google analytics and went on to describe the value of using tools like click tracking, heat maps and recordings, user surveys and user interviews. Collating the information from all these sources proved to be a powerful way to identify issues with the user assistance and devise ways of fixing them.

In the final conference session, Tony Self suggested that the commonly seen Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section on many websites should really be called SAQs (Seldom Asked Questions). The presentation left no source of trivia untapped, and rambled through the history of FAQs from St Thomas Aquinas in 1274 through to NASA and RyanAir. Other permutations of NAQs (Never Asked Questions), FAQs (Facetiously Asked Questions) and even NAQs (Not A Question) were examined in detail. By the end of the hilarious session it was clear that FAQs were really a dumping ground for information that the writer was too lazy to put in the right place, and that the only way to deal with FAQs was to remove them entirely from any documentation or website.

This year’s venue – the elegant Rendezvous Hotel on Flinders street was comfortable, central and produced copious quantities of excellent food. Overall organisation of the conference was flawless, vital networking opportunities were provided in nicely timed breaks and the two conference chairs ( Gerry Gaffney on day one and Kylie Weaver on day two) did a superb job of introducing and thanking the speakers.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable conference and a credit to the TWIA team who assembled a collection of interesting and enjoyable sessions. I’ll certainly be putting my name down for next year’s event.

* TWIA is the interim name for the national Australian Society for Technical Communication (ASTC). Under Australian law, it was not possible to use the ASTC name while ASTC (NSW) and ASTC (Vic) were still in existence. Once the two original bodies have been disbanded, TWIA will be reconstituted as ASTC.