Agenda
We’ve taken the best of our past ConVEx and IDEAS and created a new panel-based interactive virtual conference.
We invite you to participate in 12 panel discussions with industry professionals to learn tips and trends to help you hone your skills.
| Monday July 25, 2022 |
TRACK 1 | TRACK 2 |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 am – 10:30 am (Pacific) |
Journey maps/Personas/User focus
Katie Ott, ServiceNowKevin Nichols, AvenueCX Fawn Damitio, Juniper Networks |
Writing
Mugdha Bapat, Rocket Software Yoel Strimling, CEVA Val Swisher, Content Rules |
| 10:30 am – 12:00 pm (Pacific) | Break | Break |
| 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm (Pacific) |
Dynamic Delivery
Janice Critchlow, Ping Identity Barry Grenon, Genesys Frank Miller, Ryffine |
Editing
Alyssa Yell, Splunk Kit Brown-Hoekstra, [A] Melanie Davis, Reltio |
| Tuesday July 26, 2022 |
TRACK 1 | TRACK 2 |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 am – 10:30 am (Pacific) |
Working with SMEs
Megan Gilhooly, Reltio Vlad Khanin, LinkedIn Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services . |
Multimedia
Sree Pattabiraman, Extreme Networks Mark Hellinger, Videate Karen Horan, Oracle Wouter Maagdenberg, TXTOmedia |
| 10:30 am – 12:00 pm (Pacific) | Break | Break |
| 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm (Pacific) |
Metrics
Peggy Sanchez, HPE Jennifer Johnson, Hypertherm Stan Doherty, Google Aditi Kashikar, Automation Anywhere |
Localization
Anny McBride, CommScope Dawn Prunty, CommScope Candy Morton, Automation Anywhere . |
| Wednesday July 27, 2022 |
TRACK 1 | TRACK 2 |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 am – 10:30 am (Pacific) |
Content Strategy: DITA
Tracey Langenbach, FIS Sherry Keller, Dell Melanie Petersman, Siemens Amber Swope, DITA Strategies |
Content Strategy: non-DITA
Liz Fraley, Single-Sourcing Solutions Lyndsey Lynch, Amazon Rob Hanna, Precision Content . |
| 10:30 am – 12:00 pm (Pacific) | Break | Break |
| 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm (Pacific) |
Taxonomy/SEO
Sabine Ocker, Omnicell Kelly Lawetz, Genetec Maura Moran, Mekon |
Inclusivity
Larry Kunz, Extreme Networks Toni Mantych, ServiceNow Christopher Gales, Splunk |
Journey maps/Personas/User focus
Katie Ott, Kevin Nichols, and Fawn Damitio discuss questions such as:
- Writing effective content requires a deep understanding of our users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and their limitations. How do you gain that understanding and empathy?
- Many technical writers do not have direct user interaction, what advice can you give them for learning more about their users?
- User information is commonly captured in personas or journey maps. What are the pros and cons of each approach? What information should be included in each?
- How often should these profiles be updated and validated?
- How many user types or stages in a journey are required to form a good picture of the audience you are writing for? What are the critical differentiating characteristics that influence unique approaches for different users or journey stages?
- How does where a user is in their overall journey impact the documentation they need?
- What is the risk in writing as though users are starting from scratch in every stage in the journey, having no previous knowledge or experience with the product?
- Every user is different — they have different backgrounds, different expectations, different approaches. There’s no guarantee that the user possesses certain qualities when they access content designed for a specific point in a generalized user journey. How effective, then, is a user journey map in influencing the design of the content?
- How have user personas or journey maps influenced the content your company creates?
- How might user profiles differ worldwide? How can these differences be accommodated in source content to be translated?
Writing
Mugdha Bapat, Yoel Strimling, and Val Swisher will discuss questions such as:
- What does it mean to “write well”? What factors determine if something is written well? On which factors should our priorities be placed?
- How do these factors or priorities differ base on the delivery mechanism for which you are writing? For example, a video script vs an article in a support portal vs a section in a manual? How might these variations impact your ability to reuse content from one medium to another?
- What current trends are changing the definition of well-written content?
- How do you approach writing content that could be reused outside of its original context?
- How does the worldwide distribution/availability of information impact the definition of writing well?
- What suggestions do you have for writers to ensure that they have well-written content before sending it out for review — whether technical or stylistic?
- How much of writing well is subjective perception vs simple adherence to rules and standards?
- How should writers handle reviewer edits that run contrary to their standards for writing well? How do you reconcile the age-old question of who gets the last say?
- Where does the responsibility for well-written content end for the writer and begin for the reviewer/editor? Are different factors controlled by different people in the process?
- To what extent should writing well be an expected skill at entry level (ie learned in school) vs learned via experience on the job?
Dynamic Delivery
Janice Critchlow, Barry Grenon, and Frank Miller will discuss questions such as:
- Why is it called dynamic delivery? What is meant by dynamic? What does personalization mean to you? What personalization capabilities do your users have within your system?
- How did you deliver content before you moved to dynamic delivery? Do you still publish to those older outputs? Is the content the same in all outputs? What percentage of your content is in the system? How did you decide what should be in the system?
- What factors did you consider when moving to dynamic delivery? What was the driving motivation?
- What were the differentiating factors between the tool sets you considered?
- Have you met your goals? What benefits, or drawbacks, have you seen?
- What changed in your writing approach and publishing process? For example, do you publish from multiple authoring tools to your dynamic delivery platform? Do you publish more frequently than before? Did you need to change your writing standards or your information model?
- What impact has your dynamic delivery system had on your end users? For example, have you noticed a change in service calls as customers are able to self-help?
- What metrics do you track in your delivery system? How often do you review those metrics? What do you do with that information?
- What do you know now that wish you knew when you first implementing your system? What would you do differently? What would you do the same? What advice would you give teams who are considering or implementing a similar system?
- Are you using your system to its fullest potential? What does the future hold?
Editing
Alyssa Yell, Kit Brown-Hoekstra, and Melanie Davis will discuss questions such as:
- What does it mean to “edit well”? What are the considerations in determining if something is edited well?
- Editing is typically the area where time may get compressed. How does a good editor triage content to determine what requires immediate attention and will make the biggest impact?
- How does a good editor differentiate between personal preference and something that has to change?
- Can something be edited well using only an automated quality checking tool? Why or why not?
- How do you reconcile clashes between technical edits (received from an SME) and stylistic edits?
- What do you expect a writer to have addressed before content is ever sent to editing? When do you send content back as not ready for editing?
- What advice can you offer writers for being good editors of their own content before they send content for other’s review?
- How do you reconcile differences of opinion between writer and editor?
- To what extent does an editor need to be a good writer? Should editors have technical writing experience before they can be expected to edit technical content?
- What falls/shoud fall within the responsibility of the editor? Is it just text? Images? Metadata? Tagging? Look and feel?
Working with SMEs
Megan Gilhooly, Vlad Khanin, and Dawn Stevens will discuss questions such as:
- Why do so many writers find it difficult to work with their SMEs?
- How can writers gain the trust of their SMEs? How important is it for writers to have expertise on the product or in the industry to gain the respect of their SMEs?
- What can writers do to make the responsibilities of the SME with regard to content as easy as possible?
- How important is it for writers to be part of the development team? For example, an active member in an Agile scrum team? How can writers get a seat at that table? Resistance often stems, not from lack of respect, but worry about scheduling or extra time required to have any additional involvement in meetings. How can writers mitigate these concerns?
- Often there is a perception that it would be faster for an SME to write content and have the writer edit it, rather than having the writer gather information through an interview process. Do you agree with this perception? What is the most effective way for writers to gain the information they need?
- Every poll I’ve ever conducted indicates accuracy is the most important definition of content quality. Does this fact naturally give the SMEs more authority over the content than writers? Why or why not?
- What are effective strategies for writers to edit content written directly by the SMEs without argument? What are strategies for dealing with developers who insist edits are entered exactly as they have dictated?
- What should writers do to fully prepare for an information gathering session with an SME? Is it better to make an educated guess when writing and ask an SME to verify and correct, or to leave a placeholder and ask the SME to fill in the needed information during the review?
- How should a writer handle an unresponsive SME (doesn’t answer emails, late reviews, etc)?
- The involvement of SMEs in the writing and/or review process often is an argument against a move to DITA (or other structured authoring approach) in favor of using tools that the SMEs are more comfortable with. How do you counter that argument?
Multimedia
Sree Pattabiraman, Mark Hellinger, Karen Horan, and Wouter Maagdenberg will discuss questions such as:
- What are the most effective uses of media in content?
- To what extent can media completely replace text?
- When is a still image just as impactful as a video?
- What localization considerations might impact the use of media?
- Just because writers can create great text doesn’t necessarily mean they are experienced media creators. What skills do organizations need to have on hand to effectively incorporate media into their content?
- There are a lot of small and/or resource-challenged teams out there that are barely able to keep their text content up to date and so hesitate to use much media. What are the techniques that increase the efficiency of keeping media up-to-date and accurate?
- What techniques should writers include to make content in media, especially video, searchable?
- How important is a “professional” video? Is compromising on video quality akin to not copyediting your text?
- What impact does the stability of the product have on your choice of media?
- What legal considerations might be required when choosing media?
Metrics
Peggy Sanchez, Jennifer Johnson, Stan Doherty, and Aditi Kashikar will discuss questions such as:
- Why do we need metrics? How should they be used?
- What are the critical data points that every publication manager should have readily available? What do you measure and why?
- Is there such a thing as too much data? How much should people be collecting?
- What data do most companies collect that they should stop collecting?
- One of the most commonly requested metrics we get at Comtech is what is the right ratio of technical writers to the development team (engineers, for example). What is the ideal for this? What are the mitigating factors? Is this a good metric to worry about?
- Another common question is how to prove the value of documentation. What metrics would you recommend?
- How do you measure non-tangible things, like a team’s collaboration skills or the amount of stress the team is under?
- How often does data need to be collected?
- Data can be misleading without context. How do you gather the context? What is the appropriate balance of quantitative vs qualitative data?
- Productivity metrics are important to planning future projects and tracking whether a project is on track. However, they can make individual performers very nervous about how data might be used against them, and therefore such metrics might be misreported or underreported, thereby perpetuating issues with unrealistic estimates and schedules. How can you position gathering these metrics so that individuals feel safe reporting them?
Localization
Anny McBride, Dawn Prunty, and Candy Morton will discuss questions such as:
- What strategies should writers take to write better content for translation?
- How can writers be more aware of the needs and expectations of an international audience? To what extent should writers be expected to be aware of cultural distinctions when writing?
- What are red flags to look for in the documentation process or the content itself that might cause problems during the translation process?
- How might inclusivity strategies being introduced at various companies affect the localization process?
- How should localization considerations impact reuse strategies? For example, how does the granularity of reusable content impact translations? What is reasonable to expect from your translation vendors in terms of restructuring DITA tags? For example, if you were to make the object of a sentence a key, is it reasonable to expect your translation vendor to move that keyref to the right location in the sentence?
- How should localized content be reviewed and validated?
- How can tools help the globalization or localization process?
- When is it appropriate to use machine translation rather than a translation vendor? If never, what purpose does machine translation serve?
- What factors should be considered when determining if translation into a specific language is necessary? For example, how many users who speak a specific language do you need to make it worthwhile?
- How do you accommodate for text expansion and compound words, hyphenation, and word wrapping in tables in your images and page layout?
Content Strategy: DITA
Tracey Langenbach, Sherry Keller, Melanie Petersman, and Amber Swope, will discuss questions such as:
- What’s the difference between content strategy and information architecture? Which comes first, the strategy or the architecture? What challenges arise when this is done in the opposite order?
- Content strategy defines the user experience. The use of DITA defines the authoring experience. Do you agree? Why or why not? If so, then shouldn’t strategy take priority over DITA? Why do so many companies choose to use DITA without having a well-defined strategy first?
- What content strategies most influence the move to DITA? Are there strategies that cannot be supported by DITA?
- How does the choice of DITA influence content strategy? Are companies under-utilizing the power of DITA and should content strategies be expanded to take maximum advantage of DITA capabilities?
- Why DITA over a nonDITA solution? Are there any situations in which a non-DITA solution would be a better choice for a team? For example, is it worth moving to DITA if your content has limited reuse potential or you don’t translate into many languages?
- Even as many companies move to DITA, some are leaving it. Is this cause for concern?
- What are the common adjustments companies and individuals have to make when implementing a DITA-based content strategy? What things do people forget about when moving to a DITA-based content strategy?
- A common argument against DITA is that it is too complex — difficult to learn for writers and unaccepted by SME reviewers. How can companies effectively address this argument?
- DITA is an evolving standard. As we speak, the DITA Technical Committee is preparing to release DITA 2.0. What risks do these evolving standards have on your content strategy? How should these updates be evaluated against current content strategies?
- How does having a DITA-centric content strategy impact the following: hiriing and training practices (including the availability of writers with appropriate experience), review processes, delivery, translation, collaboration with other departments?
Content Strategy: non-DITA
Liz Fraley, Lyndsey Lynch, and Rob Hanna, will discuss questions such as:
- We hear so much about “why DITA”, so let’s start with the opposite. Why not DITA? Who might not benefit from a move to DITA? What specific content strategies do as well or better outside of the DITA architecture? What are the benefits and/or compromises to your content strategy in making a non-DITA decision? Is there a risk to future adaptability by staying outside of DITA?
- What are the alternatives to DITA? What are the benefits and challenges with these alternatives?
- Most people associate structured authoring with the DITA standard. By choosing a non-DITA solution, are you abandoning structured authoring? Do other solutions still support structured authoring? Is it important? What about information typing? How important is it to distinguish between different types of information, and how do you do so outside of DITA?
- A critical argument for the use of DITA is reuse. Do non-DITA solutions limit your reuse possibilities? What types of reuse are possible outside of a DITA solution?
- Arguments for DITA also include the many ways you can enforce specific structures and standards. How do you enforce your content strategies and style guide outside of DITA? For example, do you use tools such as Schematron or Xpath to create rules? Do you use controlled language tools such as Acrolynx, HyperSTE, Congree, or Kaleidoscope?
- Tied to the previous two arguments is the savings companies can realize in translation costs when using DITA. Is this benefit limited only to DITA implementations? How do you control translation costs outside of a DITA solution?
- A common argument against DITA is that it is too complex — difficult to learn for writers and unaccepted by SME reviewers. To what extent are writer and, in particular, SME preferences influencing the choice of a non-DITA solution? To what extent is the desire to standardize to a single toolset that will be accepted by all departments, or that is already present in the company, influencing the choice? Are these appropriate concerns and driving factors?
- Conversely to the complex argument, many writers still see DITA as the mainstream solution, critical to their careers. How do you address these perceptions and keep writers motivated to use non-DITA solutions?
- Unlike DITA which is a standard that many tools support, many non-DITA solutions are tool-specific (Flare, Indesign, Framemaker). What are the risks of tying your company to a proprietary solution?
- Many companies find that due to the number of DITA files they ultimately create, a component content management system is a necessary expense. Does a non-DITA solution diminish the need for such a system? If a company is not using a CCMS how are content, workflow, and translations managed?
Taxonomy/SEO
Sabine Ocker, Kelly Lawetz, and Maura Moran will discuss questions such as:
- What’s the difference between metadata, taxonomy, ontology, controlled vocabulary, SEO, and which ones do I need?
- How can taxonomy help in finding and identifying relevant information?
- Who should be involved in defining your taxonomy?
- How can we align taxonomy across the enterprise. What are the obstacles in doing so?
- What are effective strategies for term generation and categorization?
- How do you ensure that content has been classified appropriately?
- How can you determine the effectiveness of your approach?
- What value does a taxonomy management tool bring to an organization?
- Many taxonomy tools include an auto-tagging feature. How effective are these features at tagging content accurately?
- How do you address the differences that might exist between product terminology, industry terminology, and customer terminology?
Inclusivity
Larry Kunz, Toni Mantych, and Christopher Gales will discuss questions such as:
- Why is it important to use inclusive language in our documentation? Does it really make a difference to the bottom line, to whether customers will buy your products again? Did you customers ask for it? Are they appreciating that it’s being done?
- What determines whether content is considered inclusive or not? Who are we trying to include?
- Does inclusivity run counter to principles of minimalism, which to a certain extent have you catering to the masses, and not the edge cases? Not so much inclusivity like gender neutral pronouns or word choices, but the examples used or even the level of detail provided? If you don’t provide enough detail, are you therefore excluding or marginalizing people?
- What impact do inclusivity initiatives have on translation and localization? Are certain languages already more inclusive (for example, due to gender neutral pronouns)? Shouldn’t localization adapt content for cultural references so writers don’t have to worry about it? (ie Pixar’s in and out switched from broccoli to green peppers as abhorrent things to put on pizza when it was released to Japan)?
- What steps are you taking to make your content more inclusive? Can you give specific examples?
- How are you enforcing inclusivity initiatives? For example, through an editing process? Tuning quality checking tools and rules?
- Beyond the language used within the content, what steps are you taking to make content more inclusive in its delivery? For example, to the visually impaired?
- To what extent is inclusivity required? For example, if sight is required to perform a task (like driving a car), is it really necessary to worry about accommodating screen readers for the related documentation?
- How are you measuring the impact of your inclusivity initiatives?
- What inclusivity strategies do you have in place for your own employees? (Not talking about the basic law-protections, but how do you include introverts/extroverts, virtual/in-office, new/long-term, experienced/inexperienced, technical/non-technical, and ensure no group is marginalized in its participation or success within the team).