I’m currently working on a draft for a proposed new standard on developing user documentation in an agile environment. There is a lot of information out there about agile software development, but most of it is focused towards code developers, and possibly project managers. What I have noticed is there is very little advice out [...]
Posts Tagged ‘usability’
User documentation in an agile environment
Posted in writing, tagged agile, documentation, ia, standards, usability, user on September 20, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Making information technology accessible to people with disabilities
Posted in accessibility, usability, tagged accessibility, usability on September 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This is the writeup for the presentation: Making information technology accessible to people with disabilities given at Southampton University March 2009. These views are entirely my own and do not represent those of the IBM corporation.
It is important for anyone who is developing software or IT services such as websites to understand the concepts and [...]
What is usability, and how can you test for it?
Posted in usability, tagged testing, usability on September 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This is the writeup for the presentation: What is usability, and how can you test for it? given at Southampton University March 2009. These views are entirely my own and do not represent those of the IBM corporation.
Products are developed to be used by users. However, if products are not designed with usability in mind, then [...]
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7/WG2 – Plenary in Berlin
Posted in usability, work, writing, tagged berlin, documentation, iso, sc7, software, standards, testers, testing, usability on May 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve recently got back from the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 Plenary meeting in Berlin. In case you don’t understand the acronym, this is a meeting of the Software and systems engineering sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation. SC7 and it’s working groups meet twice a year, with the Plenary held in May, and working group meetings [...]
Why ‘find and replace’ doesn’t work for documentation
Posted in usability, work, writing, tagged usability, writing on February 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been having a discussion today about a ‘behavior’ with some writers that annoys me. Situations often crop up with our documentation where a term or other phrase within the docs needs to be replaced with a different term or phrase. This usually occurs because of an update – something in the software changed name [...]
A view on ‘what is Information Architecture?’
Posted in information architecture, usability, tagged information architecture, usability, work on February 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Well, the short answer, for IA in IBM at least is this:
Information Architecture is the practice of organizing, structuring, and classifying information systems, including navigation, linking, and language systems, such that the information is easy to use, easy to find, and easy to understand.
Information architects are often compared to librarians, who catalogue and categorise large [...]
GUI elements and terminology
Posted in usability, work, writing, tagged documentation, eclipse, GUI, interfaces, terminology, tooling, usability, work, writing on February 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »
One thing I find that makes writing difficult is the confusing mass of terminology around GUI interface elements such as buttons, menus, pages, windows, tabs and so on. Many of the tools that I work with have standard elements that have standard names. For example in the Eclipse platform the main ones are workbench windows, perspectives, editors and [...]
Welcome
Posted in blogging, information architecture, usability, work, tagged blogging, information architecture, usability, work on February 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Hello and welcome to my blog! This is one of several blogs that I have, but the aim with this one is to talk about interesting stuff that I do at work. I don’t consider myself to be deeply techie, hence the title of the blog, which I also use as the tag line for [...]
