• writing user help – Madcap Flare

    by Julie Ohri

    Flare is a single-source content authoring and publishing application.  I have used it quite a bit in the last two years to create the help documentation and online support for my current assignment.

    What Flare seems to do best is allow you to publish different views of the same document for various users.  For example, my current application has three user levels; basic, intermediate and admin.  I can write the help for a particular web-page and annotate it with ‘admin only’ tags to hide specific sections from the other user types.

    It’s mostly simple to use.  The authoring interface is a lot like Microsoft Word.  It talks directly to Team System’s configuration management, so keeping the help up-to-date in source control is trivial, once set up.  I have used it to publish my help files to the web, to MS Word and to PDF format.

  • A shift in thinking?

    by Julie Ohri

    Is it just me, or is there a lot more emphasis on usability lately?  Not just software, everything.

    My time is valuable, I don’t want to waste it with mouse-clicks.  I don’t want to waste it by pulling on a push-door.  I don’t want to waste it by spending 10 minutes figuring out which of the 15 buttons on the stereo console in the car displays the odometer.  I think everybody is becoming more impatient with poorly thought-out designs.  This – I find thrilling.

    Looking forward to a usable 2011.

  • Happy Star Wars Day!

    by admin

    May the 4th be with you.

  • designing for the fairer sex

    by Julie Ohri

    I was reading this interesting design article in Fast Company a while back.  It’s pointing out a recent shift in some companies to specifically take into account the ways in which women might use a product.  Here are the main points:

    1. Emphasize benefits over features.  Don’t be so darned technical all the time, tout why the product is useful and how it will make life easier.
    2. Learn her body.  Women are built differently from men.  Simply shrinking a product doesn’t always make it easier for a woman to use.
    3. Craft a cohesive story.  Women don’t just want a product, they want an experience.  Advertising, packaging, retail place and customer service should all take this into consideration.
    4. Identify a spot on the spectrum.  Extensive use of the color pink with lots of flowers, frills and bows might be more offensive than welcome.  Figure out where on the pink-scale the product lies.
    5. Remember her life stages.  Is the design aimed at the young or the old?

    I’m not currently involved in any women-centric web/desktop/mobile app designs – but when I do…

    flower

  • bad interfaces

    by Julie Ohri

    Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) has an excellent post on bad interfaces of everyday things.  I do want to add that I have the same double-switch for lights and garbage disposal and am about as successful with it as he was.  http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/bad_interfaces

  • balsamiq mockups

    by Julie Ohri

    We recently used Balsamiq Mockups to redesign a set of web pages.  I’ve done a lot of designs on paper, in HTML, using FrontPage and even Visio before, and now I know, I was doing it the hard way every time.

    Balsamiq offers a way to present user interface designs quickly and easily.  It has a drag and drop interface where you can choose from a number of common user interface elements and simply place them on your page wherever you need them.  Elements such as buttons and links can be customized to jump to the relevant page so that when you show the design in presentation mode, you can click the design as if it were a real web page.  There was little-to-no learning curve required to use this tool effectively and we were able to show the designs to our client and modify them to suit their needs in real-time during our design review.  Very convenient.  This is my new favourite web-page design tool.

    balsamiq example

  • on so-called upgrades…

    by Julie Ohri

    Over the years I’ve been a member of a few internet forums. At least two of them have been through serious ‘upgrades’ and I thought that their mistakes may serve as a good reference for any future software upgrades that I am involved in.

    Lessons Learned:

    1. Test, a lot.  Forum A lost members rapidly because they their new service was frequently unavailable (and, even worse, slow).
    2. Give users fair warning. Both forums A and B upgraded without any communication with their users.  One day I logged on and everything had changed.  I cannot exaggerate the ruckus and even rage that created.
    3. Do not assume you know how software features are used. Forum B took away functionality.  I don’t expect Forum B to retain more than 10% of it’s original community.
  • sparklines

    by Julie Ohri

    In the words of their inventor, Edward Tufte, sparklines are “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”. They are intended to be used in line with text, like this one which shows you the Nasdaq index for the month of September  189.6nasdaq sept175.9, or this one twoline sparkline that shows a comparison of two series.  Rather than giving you a single data-point, sparklines give you a context and an enormous amount of information can be presented in a very small area.  My favorite coupon website uses a bar-chart sparkline to indicate reports of success or failure from users trying the coupon bar sparkline, you could also use the mini bar-chart to indicate a team’s wins/losses.   Sparklines aren’t limited to line graphs or bar-charts – they are any graph or graphic showing a story of your data in the space of a word.

    Sparklines definitely get the thumbs up from me.  I can already think of a multitude of uses for them on my current project.  Sparked your interest too?  I generated the sparklines in this post using the Sparklines for Excel free plugin.  I also found this sparkline listing showing uses in many other technologies, such as jQuery, java, perl, Ruby, PHP…