STC Summit 2017

Do you work in a multi-product environment and struggle to keep content experiences consistent and delightful for your customers across the enterprise? Do you feel that your style and design guidance is necessary, but not sufficient, to address the task of ensuring your content is delivered to the right person, in the right place, and at the right time? If so, join Andrea for this deep-dive into modeling the content experience. You will dive into a real-world example and work in a group to follow Andrea's process for creating the framework of several models. You will complete enough of each model to continue the process back on the job, and you will take away actionable advice, tips, and tricks to make the work as efficient and successful as possible. Bring your questions and plan to get your hands dirty and have fun!

In this hands-on workshop, you will learn

• What content experience modeling is and how it differs from content or topic modeling 
• How modeling benefits your customer experience
• What some typical models are and how to identify the right models for you
• How to design, develop, and validate models
• How to enable the content designers and developers on your team to apply those models

Additional rates apply for this preconference workshop.

API documentation is a product. Are you confident you’ve built a great user experience for yours? This session covers strategies for creating, validating, and maintaining better API documentation. You will leave with practical advice on working with API development teams and tips for creating a great user experience for your API docs.

The Internet of Things* (IoT) generates huge volumes of data from a wide range of locations. This session will share experiences and knowledge gained through providing documentation support for an IoT product. Learn how this product enables programmers to build applications to process and analyze streams of continuously flowing events. The lessons learned can be generally applied to any highly technical subject, and can provide useful insight into other IoT products.

*The Internet of Things is any collection of devices that are embedded with the electronics, software, and network connectivity that enables them to collect and share data.

Compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards has been a requirement for government and public sector websites since 2008. But did you know that ADA compliance is rapidly becoming a critical need for private sector websites as well, with new standards set to take effect in 2018? Whether you are a manufacturer, retailer, or service/support organization, making sure that your website and the content you place on it meets compliance standards is a new challenge for many businesses and organizations. In this session, find out the key requirements, what applies to you along with useful tools and resources to ensure compliance.

ROI isn’t just a buzzword in the C-suite--it’s a must-have for technical communicators and managers to get the resources they need to succeed. Learn how you can cut costs, improve efficiency, and join the Agile bandwagon. Single-sourcing and the tools of information architecture will help you present your information in the most intuitive way. Users will be able to find what they need in a fraction of the time, cutting down the costs needed for support calls and training. Coordinating your efforts in an Agile development environment will smoothly manage your projects, and further cut costs. Jessica will show you how to achieve the metrics that you need to prove your business case.

Web applications (particularly those using REST) have taken off, replacing traditional client side applications. That API technology far outpaces documentation technology. Many new writers have come to rely on automated documentation systems (such as Swagger, Sand Castle, and Visual Studio’s Summary XML tags). But they are not complete. Relying solely on those tools forms only a partial API suite. The truth is the suite is a combination of several disciplines. Robert’s session goes back a step and puts API documentation in proper perspective. It outlines the requirements of API documents, such as the difference between an API and SDK (software development kit), the parts of an API, the methods description page, how automated tools can make this better (or worse), and the relationships between the writer, developer, and reader. You don’t need programming or scripting experience although those with familiarity may benefit the most.

Let’s face it: making accessible HTML outputs from DITA XML is time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. Learn how to automate your way to create accessible output using DITA XML and to optimize your HTML results. This presentation will show you how to automate inclusion of accessibility requirements with minimal DTD changes/customizations; how to move most of your testing to XML, where it can easily be corrected before publishing; how to optimize your output rendering tools and stylesheets. And you will learn the most common and avoidable DITA HTML output mistakes.

This case study shows how two technical writers and a systems administrator designed, built, and currently maintain an intranet site using only internal resources. Royal is a credit union with 27 branches and about 560 team members whose primary communication tool was email. In 2013, Royal began exploring different content management systems. With a budget of about $15k, we quickly found that the flexibility and affordability of current products were not sufficient. In late 2013, the project team delivered a radical idea to our executive team: let’s build our own custom intranet using an open-source, free solution, Drupal. For companies that need assistance with internal communication but do not have a huge budget to spend on a solution, Drupal may be what they are looking for. It was our team’s way of gaining an edge on corporate communication and getting instant results. 

Technical editing is a field in the midst of rapid change. Competencies for many editorial positions now extend beyond text and markup; today, many newly-hired editors can expect to apply best practices in editing to digitally-born products as well as print genres.This presentation provides both practitioners and academics, insight about the challenges and opportunities for training and hiring editors. For practitioners, our session situates how students perceive technical editing as both an academic subject and a workplace task, and its perceived value when reconfigured to include multimodal practices. We also highlight
how business and industry can re-envision their connections with the academy to shape editing courses that meet real-world needs. Additionally, we explore how new editing competencies can be incorporated into existing work practices and products, and what these convergences mean for future workplace hires. For academics, our session demonstrates what assumptions students had concerning the class, as well as where they perceived their greatest weaknesses for handling the coursework to be. We’ll present ideas for more effectively structuring curriculum for technical editing to meet market demands and remedy student weaknesses in order to prepare students to take on leading edge roles
in editing.

If you've seriously considered proposal writing, but not yet taken the plunge, this session is for you. It will provide an overview of proposal types, roles, tools, tactics, and strategies. We’ll look at similarities and differences between proposal writing and other kinds of technical writing. How can you sell your technical writing skills effectively to employers? What personality types and situations should you expect to encounter? And, last but not least, can you be happy in this environment? Louise will draw on her experience in sales, and technical writing and editing, as well as proposal writing, editing and management for this engaging session.

A user interface (UI) is like a joke; if you have to explain it, it isn’t very good. Like a joke everyone should understand a good UI. But, just because everyone can understand the UI doesn’t mean that all users will approach it with the same domain knowledge and familiarity. Creating an adaptable user interface that will work for novices and experts requires design and usability knowledge. This session will review the spectrum of user skills and knowledge, examine how to design for both, and cover common user interface components that can be adapted to support both novices and experts.

David will showcase studies of how HTML5 and other technologies (web apps, cloud tech etc.) are enabling self-publishers to go beyond novels, forging ahead into technical communications. Self-publishing with complex technical documents using one lite-and-easy publishing stream is disrupting our expectations--it no longer has to be difficult to get your content moving.