Yes, but can you do business with it?

To ease into blogging, I’ll start with something that has had several industries buzzing. iPhone.

Now that iPhone has landed to my country I have been eager to actually use it for more than five minutes. It’s bling, sure, with it brilliantly fast touch screen, camera, iPod, and instant access to YouTube. All that’s missing is instant access to Facebook – but hey, that can be downloaded as a free add-on application.

I’m sure Apple would like us all to be young, trendy and cool. I actually feel like putting on a pinstripe suit before touching the thing. Don’t know why. I have slight problem deciphering the bright colours, pretty display icons -that remind me of the Google Desktop icon style- and cute sound effects. I like bright colours -as long as they’re not on the clothes that I wear- and think that the display icons are sweet. I smile involuntarily whenever I hear one of the sounds that the device makes. That’s an emotional response if I ever saw one. ‘Nuff said. Let someone else do the psychological analysis on how purposeful this is on Apple’s part.

Yes, yes, yes. So I’m in touch with my inner child and am a hard-core gadget freak at heart. But I’m also a business woman and need a device that supports that role wherever I go. Style-wise, iPhone is a sure thing. It gives the impression that I’m young, trendy, etc, whatever those people in magazines are.

I’ve identified three things that I need as I trek the world and do business. (OK, that’s slightly exaggarated. But better-sounding than commuting in a bus between the city center and the office twice a day). These three things are calendar, e-mail, and office applications.

The iPhone main menu has both Calendar and Mail, so that’s promising. But where’s my Word or Word lookalike? Let’s get back to that one later. First, the Calendar. There’s a month view, day view and a list view where all my meetings are listed. A small dot below the date shows that there’s a meeting on that day. It’s a good, basic calendar. Does what it needs to do. But I’ll still prefer the Calendar in Nokia E71 and Nokia E66 – have you seen them? If not, go to the nearest store that sells Nokia devices and try one out. The Eseries calendar is even clearer and gives me more information at a glance, and there are pop-ups that give you more information about a meeting are excellent, both style-wise and function-wise.

Next, e-mail. It took me 5-10 minutes to set up e-mail, depending on what is the “success” that ends the setup procedure. iPhone didn’t recognise my e-mail service provider, so I had to enter the information there by hand. I had the examples in the fields that had to be filled, which is nice since I can mix the sending and receiving mail server addresses. After I had entered the correct data, iPhone started to verify it. It failed, and promptly told me so. Unfortunately the error message didn’t make sense to me, and then I was offered another verification method and save options. Finally setup informed me that my e-mail may not work properly and sending and/or receiving may be impossible. Well, it works anyway. Now, if only I could find the settings so that I could edit them since my password changed…Where’s my Options list?

OK, finally, the office applications. There are no office applications that I can see, but as I just happened to have a powerpoint in my e-mail, I tried to download that. It downloaded nicely, and I was able to open and view it. How annoying that I would need to make a small edit to it before sending it forward. Luckily I have my new and shiny Nokia E71 – few quick clicks and the edit’s done. I can do all the viewing with iPhone since it zooms the powerpoint’s tiny print like a dream, but will honor E71 as the portable office that it is.

So what’s the end result of this quick&dirty analysis on iPhone as a business device? It works, but there are a few things that I miss from my E71. Combine the good parts of both and you’ll see me in the stores, queuing for a copy of my own.

Getting back to business

I hope that everyone had a good summer vacation -if you have any- and are looking forward to the autumn with new activities. To me autumn means returning to old activities, including blogging!

International Information Design with Web 2.0 Techniques

Time flies when you’re having fun, or in this case working like a busy bee to get the projects done before the summer holiday season begins. Add shopping for a new job and for a new apartment and finalising a degree at the University to the list and see how the “remember to blog” post-it note is the first one to be scrapped.

So, to show that I haven’t completely forgotten TC2.0, I thought that I’d put together a little blog entry combining my core competence with my extracurricular interest, spiced with an international aspect.

In Wikipedia, information design is defined as “the art and science of preparing information so that it can be used by human beings with efficiency and effectiveness.” Naturally, any human being anywhere in the world must be given the possibility to use the information with the same efficiency and effectiveness. This means that the information design must be international.

Making the information design international means that your information plan or [insert-name-of-design-document] shows the requirements from everywhere in the world: legal texts for France, That text input for Thailand, disclaimers for Brazil, warranties for North America – whatever the requirements are in your business area.

Adding this required information can, of course, be handled with checklists from the various regions or countries that have something to add to your “plain” information design, but this approach leaves something to be desired. After receiving the requirements, you may not be able to understand them or may not know where to place them in your information plan. There will be lots of e-mails flying back and forth, which can be frustrating and prone to the “it’s in her inbox and she’s on holiday for five weeks” communication gaps.

But how about using something more 2.0? Create your information plan in a wiki.

Wikis, naturally, are built to support collaborative editing. Anyone can see the who, when and why of an edited piece of text. You, the original information designer, can create the original information plan wiki page and then let the real specialists in the regions/countries to add the information that they need to the correct place in your information plan.

Over time, the original information plan wiki page could grow into a web of wiki pages where the requirements are in their correct place and form wiki pages themselves with additional information on the requirement, its implementation in different projects, and so on.

I’m not saying that this approach would be free of problems. But it’s worth a try, as much as a spreadsheet or a document filled with requirements.

Agile documentation

How time flies when you attend a conference, catch a flu, and then try to catch up with all the work stacked in between… such as blogging

I do not have personal experience from working with agile SW. But fate has thrown some workshops and  seminar presentations about it my way. And when you hear about something where the word combo “no UI specs” pops up sometimes, as a technical communicator, you are bound to get interested.

What kinds of things could agile mean to a technical communicator?

• You need to understand your company’s SW creation process better than you may have before. Written SW  documentation may not be available in the accurate abundance it used to be. You need to understand what and why they are doing in the SW team to get the most information out of it for your own work. In the best scenario in agile, you may need to participate as a team member in the SW team’s work.
• You need to think outside the box and be innovative. The best documentation process for agile SW creation in your company may be very different from your current one. It just might be correct in your situation to do unconventional things like translate unfinished content that is still under development *gasp*. Don’t be afraid to go wild as you are planning the process and aligning it with your agile SW creation. You might be surprised at what works, or what is needed.
• You need to develop your communication skills. I kinda like Bogo Vatovec’s description of the solitary, introvert technical writer which he talked about in the Portland WritersUA conference – I am sort of that type myself. The further you are removed from the agile SW team, the more communication skills you may actually need, as you need to “extort” information from the team members outside their regular, typically face-to-face oral comms.
• You need to develop your inner sense of “good enough”. Even if you are a perfectionist who wants every comma and colon to be in their correct places, you may sometimes need to release very drafty documentation.

But this here is just my speculation. What has agile meant to you in practice?

Reflecting on minimalism

While we were in the WritersUA conference in Portland, OR, I noticed I was thinking about communication all the time. I started reflecting on minimalism and intuitiviness (as in what is intuitive does not need to be said), and “delighted” my travel companions by chattering about my observations constantly.

While these examples are not from the domain of technical communication, they may help us think of technical communication problems as we write instructions. How can you translate this to your own products and your own documentation?