Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and

We use personas because they are powerful design, measurement, and communication tools. We use them in design to help us avoid the elastic user problem--where "the user" is a total novice one minute and a technophile the next--as well as

The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created,

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual

Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you'll learn more about Personas and how they'll revolutionize the way you design and build web

There are a multitude of digital media companies in Brighton and many different networking groups. However there are very few opportunities to talk in detail about design both theory and practice. Let's see how many people we can get together

Specifications are moving in the direction of how we have been using the web for the past five years or more, e.g. video, audio and user generated content. Developers have started to fall into habits (some good, some bad), and

Ainsworth's (2006) DeFT framework posits that different representations may lead learners to use different strategies. We wanted to investigate whether students use different strategies, and more broadly, different cognitive activities in diagrams versus in running text. In order to do

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path, and she will be running a Bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York to teach others how they can more productively and efficiently work together to create great designs and better

HTML 5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

Development of HTML 5, the highly touted upgrade to the language of the Web, is progressing but still faces obstacles, including lack of a standard video codec, said an official of the World Wide Web Consortium at a gathering on

The future of how we interact with computers is exciting to say the least. What once seemed like nonsense outside of Hollywood and Science Fiction is now starting to find it's way into reality, and some of the technology is

This article addresses previous arguments that call for increased emphasis on research in technical communication programs. Focusing on the value of scholarly-based research at the undergraduate level, we present New Mexico Tech's thesis model as an example of helping students

A clear, well-illustrated guide to when one should (or should not) use an apostrophe.

As I've continued to teach my online RoboHelp class to students who attend from all over the world, one recurring issue has been confusion over the following three RoboHelp features: the start page, the project title and the default topic.

I'm amazed when I hear people say they learn nothing from others in the technical communication field. Some people have a lot of experience, so they feel there are few opportunities to learn from others. I believe they forget that

When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I

Is it really true that a freelancer shouldn't bother with a business plan? There are thousands of freelancers, after all, who started taking on clients without even thinking about writing a business plan. Nobody seems to have suffered from that

Documentation is important, from the end users to the developers, if you want your project to self sustain, if you want to ease the life of other people, and if you want your project to live a long and prosperous

The concept of having control over your help content, to update it at any time, is what I'm calling content independence. Establishing content independence in your publishing environment may be a battle that can take years. For example, at a