Archive for the 'Visual/Technical Communication' Category

The tech-comm blogosphere is erupting with news and reviews of Adobe’s new Technical Communication Suite.

For $1,600 ($1,000 for the upgrade version) you get FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp 7, Captivate 3, and Acrobat 3D.

My initial thoughts: $1k is a heck of a price for something this robust. It’s clearly an olive branch to a community that, in general, has felt somewhat neglected by Adobe for the past decade.

I cannot yet offer any opinions on the individual products themselves. I’m just returning from a hiatus of sorts, and am in the process of re-immersing myself in the tech-comm “world.” However, I think it’s safe to assume that FrameMaker will be impressive, since it was still impressive in its previously neglected self. Same with Captivate and Acrobat. RoboHelp 7 appears to be a significant improvement over version 6.

The critical opinion I feel informed enough to share at this time is a small disappointment in the choices made for the bundle. Yes, tech-comm folk use those four tools, but most that I know or work with use Photoshop just as regularly. And what about InDesign? Dreamweaver? Again, I use these products regularly; it’s interesting that these didn’t make the cut.

The Creative Suite line comes with many different incarnations (Design, Web, Production), each targeted at a specific group, yet each group has enough overlap to be useful for a wide variety of projects. Some might initially suggest that Adobe create “Print” and “Online” editions of the Tech-comm suite, but that’s product-oriented thinking, not workflow thinking. To me, it’d be nice to have a “Documentation” and “Training” versions of the suite, for instance.

One other gripe: Am I the only one who noticed that this suite isn’t in the CS family? Maybe Adobe thinks what tech-commers do isn’t “creative” enough to warrant the title. Hm.

At any rate, kudos to Adobe for finally getting on board in supporting this important niche of their customers. Companies like MadCap and TechSmith are building empires based on business models that serve the tech-comm community, and clearly Adobe noticed. No doubt things will get better for us as the giants continue to compete.

- Sarah @ Palimpsest has collected together some initial reviews of the TC Suite.

…er… certified, that is. As in “Certified Usability Analyst” – I passed the CUA exam last week.

Overall impressions of the certification process:

• HFI has done a marvelous job in making the certification process all about the industry, and not the company. Unlike other certifications, which measure how well one has memorized a given company’s way of doing things (*cough*Microsoft*cough*), HFI stays focused on training and evaluating a person’s overall usability analysis skills against industry measures. IMO, this puts the CUA in the same class as a CPA; maybe not as rigorous or impressive, of course, but just as objective.
• The exam was a bit tougher than I had expected it to be… not necessarily because of the content, but rather the time constraints. The exam is fast paced – averaging one question every 90 seconds. I finished with less than a minute to spare.
• HFI claims that it is not necessary to take the coursework to pass the exam, but I have a hard time believing that. For instance, one section had almost ten questions from online examples that were only shared during the “Science/Art of Web & App Design” seminar, none of which were available off-line or included in any of the official materials or study guides. Moral: take as many seminars as you can. If you must pick and choose, the “UCA/Concept Design” and “Sci/Art” seminars are the most important – covering information that represents about 70% of the exam questions. (Note: Every person is randomly assigned a slightly different set of questions, so the above example may not be applicable in your case.)
• A tip for those planning to take the exam (there’s another round in November): It’s more important to know where to find information than to have volumes of information memorized. Know the study guides like the back of your hand, and make sure that you’re familiar enough with the materials to flip to a specific lesson quickly for reference. Again: you’ve only got an average of 90 seconds per question, and about 80% of the questions will require some referencing, so you don’t want to spend five minutes looking for the specific research done on “Optimization of readability vs. legibility from various type sizes and line leading in single-column line length,” for instance.
• Speaking of seminars, just a reminder that CUAs are invited to take the “Research” seminar every year to stay current on modern academic research involving usability. To my knowledge, it is free to those who have already passed the exam.

UPDATE: The above information is incorrect. HFI offers a 10% discount to the “Research” seminar for CUAs (it’s not free).

Jakob Nielsen’s recent eye tracking study contains a lot of interesting data, but none more unusual than the unexpected discovery of excessive fixation on crotches by the males in his sample.

Yep, you read that right. Crotches.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

Coyne [the Nielsen/Norman Group Director of Research] adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

Oy. Well, that’s kinda humiliating. Gives new meaning to “know your audience,” I guess.

Oh, and did anyone else notice that Coyne went from cognitive function to George Brett to implied bestiality in just two paragraphs? Holy cow that was awesome.

As a bonus exercise, now that I’ve used the “b- word” in a monkeyPi post, we shall sit back, make some popcorn, and watch the Google search strings pour in.