Open Mike: Blogging with Michael Hughes

Open Mike returns for August, with STC President Michael Hughes philosophizing about personas, the value of technical communicators, the forthcoming social networking platform, and the latest Board meeting. Mike Hughes blogs here on STC's Notebook each month in a continuing effort at transparency and keeping STC members up to date on their Society.

Rhetorical Answers

I was thinking the other day that being an information architect is like having a paying philosopher gig. You get to do taxonomies—and even the occasional ontology. I was working on personas last week to describe the different roles that technical communicators fill. (The UX designer in me had decided that as president I needed to have a clearer vision of who the “STC users” were.) A collection of personas is an ontology of sorts—what are the entities that constitute STC and what are their inter-relationships? By the way, I’ll be asking for some help soon on fleshing out some of the roles I’m not as familiar with.

I started with the personas that the BoK had used to design the concept of the BoK portal. I recently revisited their working site and I was impressed with something very cool and innovative they had done with the personas: They were using them as user assistance and navigation aids! I’ve never seen that done before, and I wrote a column about it in UXmatters. It’s nice to see STC as a thought-leader setting the bar for others. If you are using personas, you might want to see how the BoK has extended their value beyond the design phase and has taken them into the delivery and support phases.

I drew on my BoK experience again recently in an article I wrote in ExecutiveBrief in which I differentiated between the value that User Experience designers bring and what User Interface developers do. One of the seed questions we wrestled with on the BoK was what differentiates a technical communicator from an engineer who writes well. In other words, if you had the latter, why would you need to hire the former?

I invite everyone to step back and philosophize about what we do and where we add value. The more we can distill those concepts into clear, concise messages, and then get those messages out, the better off we are. Board member Rich Maggiani’s recent blog is a great example of getting that message out there.

Moving on to something entirely different, we recently had a demo of the beta version of the Community Social Network platform. I can’t wait to start using it. File sharing, calendars, wikis, forums, profiles, blogs. It’s a good package. Rachel Houghton, STC Secretary, is looking at how to use it to improve the board’s collaboration. My typical experience with many tools like this is eventually you have to get past the bright and shiny technology and figure out how put it into the hands of people and use it for people-stuff.

As far as this month’s board meeting, we were still working through budget stuff mainly. We focused this month on guidelines we could communicate to community leaders about their budget expectations. Aiessa Moyna, STC’s Treasurer, will be communicating those guidelines to community leaders in an upcoming webinar. We also worked through some budget scenarios around the conference in Sacramento. The Dallas conference set the bar pretty high, and I’m confident that Sacramento is going to be a “must go” experience.

By the way, the more I look at this month’s cartoon, the more the guy in the last panel reminds me of Bill Swallow. Hmmmmm. See, Bill, that’s what happens when you make fun of one of my cartoons 😉