Article "How knowledge becomes usable" in Communicator

In my article "How knowledge becomes usable" - published in the Winter edition of Communicator - I explain how you can incorporate knowledge-driven design in information products. The Communicator is the quarterly journal of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC). The article is a follow-up on my presentation at the ISTC Conference 2007 in Liverpool.


If you are a member or a subscriber of Communicator, you automatically receive this issue. Otherwise, if there is something of interest to you, contact the ISTC Office to purchase a copy.
The ISTC is the largest UK-based society for professional communicators. If you are a technical communicator and working in the UK - or Europe in general - I can strongly recommend membership of the ISTC. Look for more information on their website: www.istc.org.uk.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using the Golden Circle Model in your resume and LinkedIn profile

Image
The last three years I worked as a (senior) business consultant and information architect at software company Be Informed in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. We worked on an amazing product, a ground breaking model-driven business process platform. And my job was to explain the possibilities of this platform to various audiences. The Be Free program, which I launched in September 2013 was a marketing campaign that targeted on making a wider group of people familiar with the product. The campaign was a great success and I had the feeling that I was really helping people in proving their ideas to their customers and managers. But the interaction was on-line and from a distance, never close enough to really understand their business goals and issues.  The sudden end of my contract with Be Informed, forced me to rethink my professional goals and ambitions. What do I really want? Do I want to be a product marketer, focused on 'pushing' a product? Or do I want to be a business cons...
Read more

Improve Product and Brand engagement through smart documentation - A White Paper about the challenge of creating user-centric documentation

Image
For most product manufacturers, delivering adequate documentation is a constant challenge. The increasing complexity of products and the stricter regulations for product documentation often lead to extensive documentation sets with 500+ pages manuals on-line or in print. The question is: how effective is all this documentation? Smart, user-centric documentation Users can be overwhelmed by long, jargon-loaded user manuals, and frustrated by a lack of clear answers. When customers don’t find a solution, blame inevitably falls on the product and the company. Bad documentation - incomplete, unclear, out of date - creates a negative engagement with products and brands. Figure 1. Smarter documentation asks users what they need to know Smart documentation leads users to success and satisfaction. These are the users who share their positive experience with family and friends, and convince them to become customers in turn. Using semantic technology, we can create the smart document...
Read more

Writing effective articles

Image
I am a writer. I have been all my life and I wouldn’t know what to do if I would ever lose this talent. I have been writing about many topics: from welding procedures and high tech greenhouse technology to  software implementations and the use of semantic technology.  Apart from the writing I enjoy digging into these topics and finding out how things really work and what the benefits are of these new technologies or approaches. But is a talent for writing in combination with an interesting topic enough to form the basis for a successful and effective article? Or do we need more? In this series of blog posts I will explore the criteria for a successful article, not necessarily providing you with a fix set of rules but rather focusing on best practices, lessons learned and examples from my own work. On the cover of a magazine One example from my own work. In 2008 I wrote an article called “The Flexible Intranet” about using semantic technology to create smarter Intranet sites...
Read more