The 2009 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey is in progress: http://www.writersua.com/

This popular survey is designed to provide a snapshot of the skills and technologies we most value in our software development work. If you’re a technical communicator please contribute your experiences to help improve the value of the results. And tell your colleagues.

No login is required. You can answer as much or as little of the survey as you choose. When compiled, the results will be freely available on the WritersUA .

[Link last checked November 2009]

If you’re thinking of going to the Annual WritersUA Conference in Seattle next March, you can get $200 off the registration fee if you register by December 18, 2009.

As I said last year, in my opinion this is one of the best conferences around. Even though it’s fairly small as conferences go (typically, about 500 people), it’s extremely well-organized by Joe and his team, is targeted specifically to those of us involved in software user assistance (online Help and the like).

The attendees and presenters are top-notch. In the one place you can mingle and share stories with the top people in software user assistance world. And people come from all over the world to attend this conference—North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa.

In 2010, the conference will cover some 70 topics, delivered by more than 50 industry experts, over three busy but very productive and energising days of learning and networking.

(And I’ve been invited host the closing session — a all-female panel discussion focusing on future trends and predictions for our industry. This will be my fifth time at WritersUA—2005, 2006, 2008, 2009 and now 2010. Woohoo! I get to ’swim with my own fish’ again!)

Hope to see you there!

BTW, the 2010 conference is at the same venue as the 2009 conference — The Westin in Seattle. Great choice — it was a terrific venue in every way last year.

[Links last checked November 2009]

We’ve all heard of or seen the bloopers and technology howlers in movies (like the guy wearing a watch in a chariot scene from Ben Hur). In fact, there are TV shows, websites, blogs etc. dedicated to the science and technology portrayed in movies and how correct (or not) they are compared to real life.

Movie studios spend many dollars getting costumes and settings just right. But sometimes they miss the small things — really small things, like the typeface used on the objects.

It seems there are typography purists out there who watch movies and see their own howlers, like this one:

Take “Titanic,” in which the numbers on the dials of the ship’s pressure gauges use Helvetica, a font designed in 1957, some 45 years after the real “Titanic” sank. (from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/arts/16iht-design16.html?_r=2&em)

I wonder how many others there are — I suspect thousands, as I’d imagine the set designers don’t really think about the suitability and age of a typeface on an object.

If you’ve been involved in a car accident, my sympathies. You have quite a bit of running around and inconvenience ahead of you, to say nothing of recovery from injuries.

One of the tasks you have to do is complete a police report and possibly one or more insurance claim forms. In my state, you get a tiny space on the police form to sketch out what happened and to which car. But with AccidentSketch.com, a free, web-based sketching tool you can drag and drop all the elements onto a drawing ready to save and print out.

(The site’s designers are German, so the English instructions are a little odd, but that doesn’t take away from the usefulness of this site. And did I mention it’s free?)

Update 23 November 2009: If you live in Western Australia, you can now report your accident online at https://www.crashreport.com.au/.  This is a joint initiative from the Insurance Commission and the WA Police, and I understand that it links into the Department of Transport database, so any information you provide about car ownership etc. will be verified against official records.

[Links last checked November 2009; thanks to Jason at PC Guru for mentioning this site in one of his newsletters]

I’ve come across a couple of ‘interesting’ time pickers recently. I don’t know the best solution for one of these widgets, but I’m pretty sure none of the ones below are it.

Of course, one of the dilemmas with a time picker is catering for users familiar with either analog and digital time displays (or both), as well as AM/PM, 12 or 24-hour clocks, and perhaps time zones and daylight saving/summer time. And do you allow text entry, with the potential for typos and other human error? If you allow text entry, then what sort of validation do you have to have on the text entry fields?

Here are some of the interesting ones I’ve seen:

The one above allows text entry as well as picking a time from an analog-type display. Personally, I find it very confusing, and the color shading just adds to the confusion. Instead of the hands that you would have on a normal analog display, there are just numbers, including all the minute numbers, with an AM and PM selection option in the middle.

This next one (from http://www.kpao.org/blog/2009/10/steal-this-idea-time-picker-wi.html) is similar to the first, but I think the interface is a little clearer. It has the same information on it as the first, but the numbering for the hours and minutes, as well as the AM/PM selection options appear to be less confusing than the first example.

Finally, there’s this one (from http://haineault.com/media/examples/jquery-utils/demo/ui-timepickr.html):

This one requires you to click in the text box or on the clock icon. Doing so displays the hours (1 to 12), then as you hover over each numbered box for an hour, you get the quarter hour minutes, and as you hover over one of those you get the AM/PM choices. It’s a solution that  requires good mouse hovering skills and, as far as I could tell, you can’t access the times without using the mouse. You can’t type in the time — when I tried it on that web page, it wanted to display the little boxes.

Finally, two free downloadable screensaver ‘word’ clocks with a difference, from http://www.simonheys.com/:

• Word Clock: http://www.simonheys.com/wordclock/
• Rotary Word Clock: http://www.simonheys.com/rotarywordclock/

Word Clock screensaver

[Links last checked November 2009; thanks to AB for alerting me to these]

I ranted a bit about the labeling on a tube of bath gel the other day. Today it’s the turn of labeling masquerading as marketing spin. Or is it marketing spin masquerading as product labeling?

Bring on the shampoo!

You’re standing in a supermarket aisle, looking at the vast array of shampoos. How do you choose? Do you always go for what you’ve used before, or is it time to try something new? Let’s assume you want to try something new. How do you go about determining which shampoo will be the best for your hair? For many people, the information on the product label becomes an important part of the decision making.

The problem is that labels for products such as shampoo are full of puffery and pseudo-chemical buzzwords, not substance. Here’s an example:

Shampoo: Front label

The front isn’t too bad, though there are some confusing bits on it:

• Moisture Therapy. I’m not sure what Moisture Therapy is, but I assume it’s associated with moisturizers, not with water.
• Nourishes Daily Damaged Hair. Hmmm. Now what does that mean? Hair that’s damaged daily? Nourishes damaged hair, daily? And what does ‘damaged hair’ mean anyway? Broken or split ends? Dry, brittle hair? Overly colored hair? Overly permed hair? Teased hair?
• Keratin. But what about keratin? Is it contained in the shampoo? If so, why not say ‘Contains keratin’?
• With 4 moisturisers… to help lock in moisture and fight damage. We aren’t told what those moisturizers are, nor why there are four of them (Wow! Four moisturizers!) and if that’s significant. And we’re still not told what sort of (hair) damage we’re fighting with this product.

So you turn to the back to see if there’s more information that can help you decide whether this product might be suitable for you. And now you cop the full force of the marketing mumbo-jumbo!

Shampoo: Back label

I’ll only touch on some of these:

• Thirsty hair need some tender loving care? Hair gets thirsty? Hair may get dry, but it doesn’t have a mouth and it can’t drink.
• Quench it with the TLC your hair craves… TLC is not explicitly defined (tender loving care), and ‘quench’ sounds like your hair is going to have a long cold drink on a hot summer’s day. And hair ‘craves’? Why not use the plainer word ‘needs’ or ‘wants’?
• … help smooth your hair’s rough spots and bring back all the moisture it needs. Hair has rough spots? Gee, I wonder if mine does. Perhaps it does. Maybe this product will solve a problem I didn’t know existed and didn’t suspect I might have until now.
• What to do: It’s simple TLC… Huh? Why not ‘Just lather and rinse’, or even ‘Lather and rinse’. What’s the purpose of the ’simple TLC’ statement in an instruction?
• What it is made of. Why are the ingredients listed in all upper case, in a narrow, closely-kerned font? Could it be that the manufacturer is complying with the regulations, while not making the ingredients readable to the consumer?

After reading this label, you still may not have any idea if this shampoo is the right one for your hair! So, you either grab what you’ve always used, or go for the cheapest price within the price range you find acceptable. All because the marketing spin on a label was so confusing, you don’t know if the product is of use to you or not.

You’ve had to reformat your computer, you’ve upgraded your existing one, or you’ve got a new one. Now you have to install all the applications (apps) you use on a daily basis, including downloading the latest and greatest of the freebies you use all the time, like Firefox, iTunes or Skype.

Be prepared to add several hours to your installation time — finding the apps’ websites, determining which is the latest version, waiting for them to download, installing them…

There has to be an easier way! And there is. Enter Ninite (http://www.ninite.com). You choose the freeware and open source apps you want to install from a single web page and Ninite does the rest while you go off and do something else.

Neat.

Has this tip helped you? saved you time? saved your skin? You can thank me by clicking on the cup and buying me a coffee. (An E-Junkie shopping cart page will open where you can pay for my coffee via PayPal.)

I’ve always read pretty much everything in front of me, and that goes for labels on jars, bottles, tubes, etc. When I was a kid, I’d read every word on the cereal box and milk carton (I’m old enough to remember milk bottles but they didn’t have much in the way of writing on them, so when milk cartons came in, I was happy!).

So because I continue to read labels, I get exposed to all sorts of pseudo-chemical and marketing stuff in my daily life. Sometimes a product’s labeling really stands out, but not because it’s good — because it’s so bad or unintelligible.

Here’s an example:

How many ways is this label wrong? Let me start the ball rolling with the list of ingredients :

• ‘Aqua’. Why not use the more familiar ‘water’? Or, to follow the lead of the other ingredients, ‘Hydrogen Hydroxide’
• ‘Sodium Chloride’. Isn’t that just common ’salt’? Then why not say so?

Of course, those working in the cosmetic industry may beg to differ — I don’t hold myself up as someone who knows a lot about chemistry. But if the aim is to get people to understand the list of ingredients, then at least use plain language names for common things such as ‘water’ and ’salt’, unless there is some real difference between ‘aqua’ and ‘water’.

Next, let’s look at the warning:

“Use only as directed. Excessive or prolonged exposure may cause irritation to skin and urinary tract. Discontinue use if rash, redness, or itching occurs. See Physician if irritation persists. Keep out of reach of children.”

Nothing wrong with that, you might think. But I see a few issues with it:

• ‘Use only as directed’. I’d like to, but there are no instructions for use anywhere on this tube, and it didn’t come in a box (it was a freebie in a hotel room), so I couldn’t see if there were instructions on the box or a leaflet inside it.
• ‘… may cause irritation to skin and urinary tract  … rash, redness, or itching’ There’s a problem! So what is this nasty product? It’s bath gel!!
• ‘See Physician…’ Why not ‘See your doctor…’ or ‘Seek medical advice…’. This is a product made in Australia, found in an Australian hotel, and Australians rarely use the word ‘Physician’ for a medical doctor.
• ‘Keep out of reach of children’. This would be difficult to achieve in a shared bathroom! Bath gels are a kids’ paradise — they’re goopy, squeezy, colorful,  smell nice, and they smear really well.

See also:

• Even everyday objects need clear writing
• Silly Labelling

Microsoft have made a Windows Help (WinHlp) viewer available for Windows 7.

You can download it from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=258AA5EC-E3D9-4228-8844-008E02B32A2C&displaylang=en

[Link last checked November 2009; thanks to Rob Cavicchio [Microsoft MVP] who alerted the Help authoring community of this new resource]

If you are, then you might like these two resources.

The first is a set of stickers ready for you to add to signs, menus, etc. (available for purchase from here:
http://dylanmeconis.myshopify.com/products/grammar-nerd-corrective-label-pack):

The second is a useful comic-style ‘poster’ on ‘How to use an apostrophe’, from http://apostrophe.me/.