March 9, 2010
A while ago I was gathering feedback on different tech comm deliverables. I asked a user if she preferred videos or written material when learning software. I thought she would immediately say “videos,” but it was a toss up for her. In her mind, videos involved long stretches of narration that included sitting passively at her computer, waiting for the narrator to get to her question but never really getting there.
A lot of people feel the same way about videos. In a...
March 7, 2010
One of my goals in creating engaging video tutorials is to develop a warm, personable, natural voice, like the voice of an encouraging friend or mentor.
In search of this more personable voice, last year I attended a voiceover workshop in my area. The voiceover coach explained that good voiceover artists start by imagining a situation—in their minds they imagine who they are, who they’re talking to, and what kind of situation and environment they’re in.
Voiceover artists have...
March 4, 2010
For several months I’ve been looking for a quiet room to record screencasts at my work. Our building has four floors for more than 600 IT professionals. I investigated more than 20 conference rooms, poked my head in empty offices, walked around unfamiliar floors, inquired here and there.
When people see my looking, they don’t understand what I mean by a “quiet” room. What does quiet mean? Stop and listen to the sounds around you. The fan, a ticking clock, a...
March 3, 2010
At the upcoming STC Summit, I’m presenting a session called “Developing a Personal Voice in Audio.” In this presentation, I’ll explain how to “deliver video tutorials with a friendly, personable voice by implementing several audio techniques common to professional voice talents and sound engineers.
One way I prepare for presentations is by writing a series of blog posts about the topic. So over the next two weeks, I’m going to write 10 posts about...
In an effort to give more visibility and exposure to the companies who advertise on my site, I’m providing a regular “Messages from the Sponsors” post. In this post, I asked my sponsors if they have any messages they would like me to share with my readers. Since it was the first time I asked this, not everyone was ready with content, but two of them (Scriptorium and Madcap Software) did provide messages, which I’ve inserted below.
Scriptorium.com
...
March 2, 2010
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Length: 45 min.Flare 6 is available today from Madcap Software. This weekend I interviewed Mike Hamilton, VP of Product Management, about the new features Flare 6 contains. In this podcast, we talk about...
March 1, 2010
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Length: 80 min.In this podcast, Michael Hiatt at mashstream.com presents to the STC Intermountain chapter on documentation in the cloud. By documentation in the cloud, he...
February 27, 2010
It’s always hard to tell exactly why or how a site gets hacked. One of the WordPress sites I created for a client kept getting hacked. I took more extreme security measures, changing the database table prefix, adding an htaccess file to wp-admin that filtered IP addresses, adding a plugin to encrypt logins, adding a firewall, moving wp-config to another directory, and other measures. I thought the problem was with WordPress.
Then last weekend, I checked the site, and it was...
February 26, 2010
I’m nearing the release of a project that I’ve been working on for about a year. All those deadlines that seemed to be many months in the distance are suddenly weeks away. As the project manager was reviewing the rollout schedule with me, he paused to admit that he was a little overwhelmed with everything going on. There’s simply a lot to do with a product rollout — user acceptance testing, quality assurance regression testing, change management release dates and...
February 22, 2010
Today I spent a rather lonely day writing documentation. I had one team meeting, during which our team gathered for what seemed like a brief second. We then departed back to our respective portfolios, most of us working alone and in solitude toward some distant documentation goal.
Some writing teams sit together. They chum with each other all day long about commas and online help layouts. At my first job as a technical writer, I sat in a long row of cubicles we figuratively called...
