Conference Review: STC Technical Communication Summit, Usability Track

Required Sessions

The four sessions that were required to complete the usability certificate were not obvious choices on the part of the organizers. Of the dozen or so sessions that included the word usability in their titles, only one was a required session for the certificate. The four required courses were

• “Don't Leave Me Out! Designing Usable and Accessible Web Sites,” by Ginny Redish—During her talk, Ginny spoke about an ideal approach to accessibility, as shown in Figure 1.
• “Web Form Design Best Practices,” by Luke Wroblewski—He gave us many useful best practices for designing Web forms like those shown in Figure 2.
• “Writing for the Web,” by Ginny Redish—One would think it was 1996 with a topic like “Writing for the Web.” Considering the vast majority of people in the audience were professional writers, Ginny reviewed best practices that all of us should have known in the first place. However, one slide I found interesting gave statistics on how people use the Web, as Figure 3 shows.
• “From Graph Paper to the Internet: New Techniques for Visualizing Data,” by Charles Kostelnick—The inclusion of the session on visualizing data was a complete mystery to me—usability of technology was not what this session was about. It was about one new way of graphing data—mosaic—that was so confusing no one at the session even pretended to get it. It was purely academic and not one bit useful to people who were there to earn the usability certificate.

Of these four courses, only two were remotely useful to me—forms and accessibility—but even those were redundant to the seminar I had attended over the weekend.

The Rest of the Conference

I went to four other sessions, the first of which was Carolyn Snyder interviewing Jared Spool. As expected, this was an interesting romp through UX ideas and stories—such as “The best thing about users is that someday they will die.” Jared also briefly discussed the future of technical communication, but apparently he held his tongue, because a post to his blog later in the week revealed that he thinks the profession is dying. Looking at the comments—one is mine—this is not a popular viewpoint, for obvious reasons. The problem seems to be: If we, as UI designers, do usability testing and use bulletproof design techniques, this will keep documentation at a minimum. And this is as it should be. But technical writing has focused on the needs of users since before usability even had a professional title. Technical writers will always be needed. But I’ll forgive Jared this time, because he bought me a glass of wine at the happy hour he and Carolyn hosted on Monday evening.

The other sessions I went to mostly concerned usability testing and case studies. My favorite one of these was “Pattern Language as Knowledge Management Tool,” by Professor Michael Hughes—a UXmatters columnist. He discussed how he built an Access database with a Web interface to keep track of his usability test findings. The goal of this application was sharing corporate knowledge and making it more available and better organized. He was a terrific speaker and shared some very apt wisdom on moving corporate knowledge from the individual level to the organizational level.

Conclusion

The conference was three weeks ago and I’m still waiting for the conference proceedings CD-ROM I ordered, as well as my actual certificate. We were supposed to receive the CD-ROMs at the conference, but they weren’t ready yet. (I had to ask three different information desk people before I got that answer.) Despite this being STC’s 54th annual conference, it seemed like maybe the second or third time they’ve put this together. There was a severe lack of overall organization, and the planning of the tracks was amateurish at best. What STC has to remember is that not everyone is interested in STC as an organization, and many conference-goers are not even members. Certainly they should not cater to non-members, but the Technical Communications Summit concentrates a bit too much on the business of STC. Still, I truly enjoyed my experience at the Summit in Minneapolis, and I did come away with new vigor and knowledge about user experience as a profession.