With growing awareness of content strategy as a distinct discipline, STC Fellow Rahel Bailie saw a need to foster the field within the wider context of technical communication. When the group’s charter was approved in September 2009, she needed a site online quickly, so she reached out to me.
There's a lot of overlap in skills and process between user-centered design and technical communication. This presentation explores that overlap by answering three questions: What exactly is user-centered design, how can technical communicators borrow from UCD to make their deliverables better, and where in the UCD process can technical communicators contribute to increase their value?
I asked my Twitter friends what one tidbit of wisdom they'd share with someone new to usability testing. Their responses provide great insights on planning and facilitating usability tests.
As a user experience designer in the agile world, my job is as much about influencing my team's DNA to include best practices for UX design as it is about actually designing. I stumbled on one powerful method for doing that--tying user research and user stories together using personas.
Sprint after sprint, I watched my team commit to a reasonable amount of work and then utterly fail to deliver it. Turns out, a team's not much of a team without a shared goal.
