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Jason Owen

Minimalism Revisited: An Interview with John Carroll - 0 views

intercom.stc.org/...an-interview-with-john-carroll

intercom minimalism carroll knowledgemanagement

shared by Jason Owen on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • people need to act, they need to be engaged
  • they need to struggle
  • The minimalist idea, the way I think of it, is to minimize the extent to which the system and the information get in the way of what the user’s really interested in.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the impulse to end up with Louis XIV, with decoration, and extras, and so forth, is something you always have to struggle against.
  • do like the term “learner.” “User” is passive, to me—you’ve been handed something, use it—whereas I think what people are doing is much more actively a matter of ownership and appropriation and coming to control a new tool in a new environment. And it is a matter of learning. It’s a matter of problem-solving. Besides being cumbersomely long—you could call them “problem-solvers….”
  • eally just a fundamental truth about learning. People need to act. We are, after all, talking about skill learning. We’re not talking about pondering abstract concepts or definitions or conceptual information, declarative information. It’s mostly skill learning and you learn skills by doing.
  • I would say that brevity is more a consequence of minimalism than a principle of minimalism. If you go back to what I was saying earlier about trying to facilitate the learner’s initiative and goals and aspirations and impede them less, you will most likely end up with a briefer design, or it might be layered. I was alluding earlier to David Farkas’s contribution to minimalism in the book Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel which had to do with layered designs. This was a way in his work of getting the information design out of the learner’s way, making the information layered so that it was available on demand, but not necessarily an impediment if the learner didn’t choose to look at it at that time.
  • we realized these people did have goals and they were experts, but they weren’t experts with the Displaywriter or the IBM PC. They were experts in office work, and they knew a lot about work practices, and processes, and objectives, and quality standards, and they knew more than we did. And we came to see that prior knowledge as an important resource that needed to be leveraged in the design of information, the design of training materials, and the design of user interfaces.
  • Jason Owen on 16 May 13
     
    "Minimalism Revisited: An Interview with John Carroll"
Jason Owen

Do we need a content strategy? | DITA XML.org - 0 views

dita.xml.org/...do-we-need-a-content-strategy

contentmanagement dita contentstrategy

shared by Jason Owen on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • What is a content strategy? A content strategy reveals who the end users are, the goals they are pursuing and what tasks they must do to reach the goals. The content strategy explicitly describes what type of information end users need to do the tasks, which gives us the content to include and not include in a manual and how to organize it to make content searchable. A content strategy shall answer a number of questions (for example, open the document via link "information design questions" On http://www.sesam-info.net/planning.htm). The answers are sometimes referred to as the information model.
  • The content strategy shall also deal with areas such as metadata, reuse strategy, creation and release processes, publishing mechanisms, content ownership and responsibility, tools etc.
  • Let us elaborate two types of content creation organizations within the technical communication domain: Explicit and implicit organizations.  In the implicit organization there are no content strategy written down. Each member (technical writer, SME etc) has their own view on what content they believe end users need. In the best of worlds these views are aligned without the members having discussed it. In other implicit organizations an information designer has taken the role to plan and design the content (together with the team or not). But the strategy and principle that the information designer is following may not be communicated or understood by the technical writers or SMEs. So the information designer has to be consulted every time a new manual is developed or a macro content change is proposed in an existing manual. In explicit organizations the strategy and principles are written down and communicated.
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  • What benefits is possible to see from having a content strategy? Content creation teams are spending less time or planning and developing the content specifications, which helps team be more efficient which allows the company to launch the new products faster on more markets. The writing process is likely to improve since it is clear who the end user is and what type of information is needed. The content strategy also reveals the requirements and expectations a company imposes on the content creation team.
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