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Focus on the User: Personas a Key Element

Moving to a component content approach to delivering content and learning offers a significant opportunity that is often missed: the opportunity to focus on the user. Too often the focus is on selecting technology—what's the right tool to use—rather than the content and learning needs of the user (who needs what, when, and how). By looking first at the needs of the user, new information and learning models emerge.

In many organizations understanding what's needed comes from the inside out. Content deliverables, learning roadmaps, curriculum plans are based on what's been done in the past rather than understanding how users work and what information and learning is needed to improve their performance.

Building user profiles is a key way to understand the needs of the user. At Lasselle-Ramssy profiles comprise three elements: personas, task analysis, and use cases or user stories. Let's start with personas. Persons are a rich description of each key audience group based on their skills, goals, behavior patterns, and attitudes, and the work environment. They go beyond typical demographic descriptions of users to develop an in-depth understanding of what motivates the user on the job. Personas include insights into users' problem solving approach, anxieties, basic learning approach, on-the-job and personal obstacles to attaining proficiency and the user's own assessment of when and how they need and use information. Personas also include the demographic description, job responsibilities, and technical profile.

It's important to personalize the personas—to give them a name, a face and a voice. This helps communicate with your internal team—especially cross functionally—and also makes it easier to remember who you're working for. Who is the ultimate consumer of the information you are developing? How can you help them be more productive? How will that help make your company (company's product) more successful?

Leveraging Content

Last week I wrote about the mega trends that are affecting content development and delivery. One of those trends is the dramatic increase in the amount of content. Estimates are that it is increasing at the rate of 60% a year. How can you manage this relentless growth and leverage this valuable asset?

Three approaches offer ways not only to increase efficiency, but also to ensure that the content you develop and maintain is effective.

Approach One: Focus on the User. Understanding the needs of the user is central to managing content. Assumptions about the information users need are based on what's been done in the past rather than understanding how users work today and what information is needed to improve performance. The workforce and customer base are changing: both are global, multicultural, and multigenerational. Developing a 360 degree view of user personas that goes beyond demographics and job description to fully understand how they work and the information they need to be productive on the job can result in innovative content and learning solutions that map the content model directly to the work model. By shifting the focus from simply creating or capturing content to delivering the right content (who needs what, when, and how) new content and learning models emerge and it becomes possible to prioritize high value content.

Approach Two: Single Source Content to Reuse, Repurpose, and Reduce. One of the most important ways to leverage content is through reuse and repurposing. By creating content components or modules you can re-use content to build a range of deliverables in different formats for different audiences and purposes. While single sourcing and reuse is often touted as an efficiency measure it is increasingly acknowledged as a method for achieving higher productivity and customer satisfaction—another way of saying higher quality. You can customize content more easily to address the needs of specific customers and create new types of deliverables as well.
Many people assume single sourcing is a technology solution. While tools are an important component of the solution, it's a change in your approach to developing and delivering content. It's a business approach and includes a new understanding of your customer (internal and external), new skills for content developers including a move to topic based writing and looking at workflow and processes.

Approach Three: Optimize Content Infrastructure. Too often organizations that develop content—technical publications, learning, and marketing communications, focus on just that—content. They don't look beyond the content to the infrastructure or system that creates, delivers, and maintains it. Other parts of the organization such as manufacturing optimize lifecycles and supply chains. Content, however, is often developed within a department that fine tunes content deliverables without recognizing the opportunities for cross functional collaboration to lower costs and improve overall customer satisfaction that drives increased retention and delivers revenue. Five key areas that work together and need to be evaluated are: customer, content, technology, process, and the content development team. If you want to manage and leverage content to focus on the user and get the benefits of the component content, you need an infrastructure to support that move.

Choosing the Right Technology for DITA Transformations

I've been involved in processing XML for about 10 years. Most of that time the tool of choice for taking XML from one format (DITA, DocBook, RSS, etc.) and transforming it into another format has been XSLT.

Most of the XML transformations I've worked on involve leveraging an existing library such as the DITA open toolkit, or the DocBook stylesheets. The DocBook stylesheets are a suite of XSLT files that make it quite easy to build nice output in multiple formats (PDF, HTML, Microsoft Help), and support translating the content into multiple languages.

Some really bright folks have created some very powerful libraries with XSLT, that do make it much easier to work with DITA or DocBook and get output in multiple formats.

Anyone with the challenge of selecting a technology direction and strategy needs to consider several factors when making a decision. Here are factors I consider when making strategic technology decisions:

Suitability:

Does the technology fit the problem?

Learn-ability:

What is the learning curve for adopting the technology?

Maintainability:

How maintainable is the solution going to be?

Flexibility:

How flexible will the solution be?

Supportability:

Is there a community of experts to help and to hire?

Resilience:

Is there an exit strategy if the initial approach doesn't work out?

Cost:

How much effort and money are needed to get started and to grow?

XML gets very high marks for resilience, flexibility, and supportability, and usually, suitability.

In the area of Documentation and Learning, DITA and DocBook both allow companies to enrich content by embedding semantic intelligence in the text. An XML can allow the same content to be used in different contexts. DITA, an XML vocabulary and information architecture for documentation, also scores very high on these criteria.

What are your criteria? What else do you look at when selecting a technology for specific problem?

Next time: Ruby vs. XSLT for XML processing

Mega Trends Driving Technical Content

"We have no other choice than to invest in creating the future, not merely preserving the past," —Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

Did you take a wait and see approach during the economic downturn or have you embraced this past year as a challenge and adopted a change or die attitude? Now that we're hearing encouraging news, companies who used this year to build and retool will be ready to prosper in a leaner and meaner future. If you were waiting, the world was not. Three mega trends that directly affect technical product content continued to gain momentum.

First, current estimates are that content is increasing at the rate of 60 percent a year. And that number may be even higher in companies that are process oriented, highly-regulated, and driven by knowledge workers. Content is often generated in an ad hoc way. So the volume of content continues to grow, but the value decreases. It's redundant, people can't find the information they need, it's developed but never used—it doesn't align to business results or the task at hand. Content is growing at a relentless pace—it's a valuable asset; you have to manage it in a new way.

Second, customers have never been more diverse or more demanding. While you wait, your customers are changing. Their jobs are changing, their expectations are changing, and their need for information is changing. Social media and user generated content are becoming part of the total customer experience.

Third, we live in a global economy that demands a global response. Your customers—both internal and external—want content in their own language. This means content—especially product content needs to be translated. More than 20 languages is becoming the norm.

You can't stop major external mega trends and economic forces. Is the content you're developing ready to meet the needs of your customers and your business demands for efficiency?

Get DITA-Ready at DocTrain East

Lasselle-Ramsay project manager Tim Bombosch, Ph.D., PMP, co-presents Success Factors for DITA Adoption with XMetaL: Best Practices and Fundamentals at the DocTrain East Conference in Burlington, MA. This session will be a hands-on learning event offered in the post-conference track on November 1. The majority of the workshop will focus on DITA fundamentals and authoring with XMetaL. Participants will learn:

- Content Creation
- Organizing Content
- Creating a Publication, Bookmaps, and DITA maps

Get the details on the conference at the main DocTrain East site. The Conference theme is Producing Quality Content. See Lasselle-Ramsay there!

LavaCon: You Know You Want to Go

With a name like that, who wouldn't? LavaCon's annual conference on Technical Communication and Project Management is held this year in partnership with the Honolulu Chapter of the Project Management Institute.

The conference theme:   Advancing the Art and Science of Technical Communication and Project Management. And the venue: Honolulu in November 6 - 8. And the speakers: Joan Lasselle gives a talk on Using the Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measuring Project Success. A balanced scorecard goes beyond schedule, budget, and traditional productivity measurements to show how a broad, values-based definition of success can be measured. The talk explains how to do a balanced scorecard and is followed by a case study on how Cisco Systems and Lasselle-Ramsay used the approach to measure project success. The discussion will focus on the key success factors
for implementing a balanced scorecard approach, including:
- Translating strategy into operational terms
- Aligning project goals to organizational strategy
- Making measurement a continual process
- Creating team buy-in
- Four key measures: financial, customer, internal, and learning/growth
- Methodology: how to quantify your results

Come to LavaCon Hawaii, meet Joan, and learn this new approach

Social Media for Business Development

Over the Labor Day weekend there was a Bond-a-thon on VH1. Roger Moore, in monitoring the deeds of his Russian enemies in Octopussy, looked at the movie playing on the face of his digital wristwatch. Q's marvelous device hardly raises a pulse because it looks so normal to see a video playing on a small portable screen.

Then there's Mad Men. Magic-markered storyboards, typewritten copy (typed by secretaries in the steno pool), and cocktail-fueled business networking in the office and at lunch seem like the rituals of a extinct race.

Technology has rendered some former everyday practices antique while making exotic ones seem obvious. Content- and media-sharing tools like YouTube and Google Docs are integrated into the regular business tool set and the benefits to productivity are abundant. Are the social media tools, like FaceBook, My Space, and LinkedIn, equally as well integrated and useful? In the professional services business, in which most employees have revenue-generating responsibilities, social media tools can be a huge time drain. The ROI for the time investment is hard to measure and controls on the corporate image projection are scant. Which social media sites work best for business lead generation, and is that even the point? Social media tools are not meant to be the 21st century equivalent to Mad Men's cocktail tray. But since time is the precious commodity, the value of the time spent using these tools must be evaluated with, ahem, a gimlet eye.

Of course we are all still waiting for the 21st century equivalent to the conference table ejector seat.

Web 2.0 just won't go away

If you are an information development professional, toiling away in corporate America, producing manuals, or web copy, or learning modules for customers, support staff, sales, or marketing initiatives, you might be wondering about the web 2.0 communications mesh. Or maybe we should call it the web 2.0 communications mess.

If you have a limited budget and ramp-up time but have been asked to use Web 2.0 tools to improve your documentation projects and customer satisfaction, with an eye to ROI and costs, what would you pick to implement first?

• install an internal wiki
• port all the manuals to html and post them on the corporate web
• argue in favor of a CEO blog for promulgating the "authentic" voice
• do all project management online
• abandon MS Office for Google tools
  

If you are considering doing any of these things, we'd like to hear from you. It's confusing out there and it's also hard to measure results.

Why does SaaS Matter?

Software as a service is so prevalent now that it seems archaic to order an application on a CD. Online pay-as-you go tools and online file storage blur the line between locally-owned and web-based content and tools. Even so, loosening your iron grip on the CD takes some getting used to.

A NYT article on consumer behavior toward media purchases suggests that younger (under 40) folks don't have this need to hold and touch their media purchases. Downloading and single-item selection make them total strangers to this media ownership concept. They have never had 3-ring linen binders of user docs in box sleeves that signified an authorized purchase. They never kept torn off bits of packaging listing serial numbers and product keys taped to installation instructions and jammed into busted CD jewel cases. They aren't chumps willing to pay 700 or 1400 bucks for bundled applications.

Bravo to them.

But in trading ownership for convenience and easy, regular updates, what have we lost? SaaS seems to place greater emphasis on the web-based aspect of the software and much less on its features and help. For example, using Google docs makes collaboration easy--this blog is written in Google docs then published to Blogger. But for corporate doc development and sharing, the tool set is minimal and you can quickly run short of format options that render it useless except for memo-length work.

What's your experience with a free or paid SaaS app?