My Experience at InterChange 2015

These past two days, I attended the Society for Technical Communication New England Chapter's InterChange conference. It was an opportunity for me to catch up with the colleagues I've interacted with since last May, grow my network, and learn new ideas about technical communication that I could take back with me to my career and into the technical communication class to my students.

I was excited to arrive and see Emily Alfson again. She stepped down from her position as chapter president last year, and relocated to near Detroit, but she remains involved in the conference and other chapter activities by telecommuting at council meetings and networking with the members over social media and e-mail. We discussed my career development, and she left me with some wise words about starting a new career in technical communication, "You have the skills, and you're very professional. The right job will come to you, you just have to keep trying and let the decision makers do their job. Even if you don't have the skills, let them know you can do other things, or similar things, to put your skills in a positive light." I will definitely use this mindset as I continue my job search.

I attended two presentations hosted by Steve Jong. His first one, "How Mentoring Strengthens Our Profession" really hit home on how important it is to pass on the "Tribal Knowledge" of technical communication into the next generation of professionals. He explained that Millennials (or Generation Y) are more optimistic, want to feel fulfilled in their careers, and want some direction and encouragement to make sure they are on the right path to success. This contrasts with the Baby Boomers, who have held onto the labor market for decades, and seek personal wealth and status as their primary professional concerns. Eight thousand Baby Boomers will retire every day for the foreseeable future, and it's important that the knowledge they gained is not lost. The new mentoring program at the New England Chapter, he explains, is one way where experienced professionals can meet with younger technical communicators, or people looking to change careers into technical communication, and the knowledge Baby Boomers contains is invaluable and can do so much good when combined with the optimism of today's upcoming professionals.

Steve's second presentation, "To Illustrate or Not to Illustrate," described the different image formats available, and their appropriateness for each medium. His comments on JPG images, in particular, really opened my eyes and explained why, after saving them repeatedly, they become so dull and distorted to the point where they're not fit for presentation. I try to use PNG images where possible, but even that may not be appropriate for all mediums. Also, he suggested maximizing the image as much as possible and then compressing it when saving in a bitmap format, so that when the file is created, no distortions in detail and color can happen. I experienced the issues with JPG before, but had no idea of the ramifications of other formats, so this was a very valuable presentation for knowing the appropriate formatting for print versus various electronic mediums.

Richard Lippincott gave a great presentation about instruction manuals, "Writing for Hardware: You Can't Always Touch It." In this presentation, Richard detailed how large and complex objects defy the idea that writing for hardware is easier because someone can pick up an object or turn on a switch to operate it properly. I really liked his discussion about low-complexity repair manuals and what they need for users. I'm currently teaching iFixit, a service-learning project, to my technical communication students. Richard's discussion on troubleshooting versus repair or replacement is something I'll bring to my students. He defined troubleshooting as isolating a problem to a particular subsystem or component. I will explain this to my students so they realize that creating troubleshooting answers to problems isolates what exactly is wrong with their device, and that not every problem ends with a repair guide, a last resort.

Finally, Kimberly Lacerte's presentation, "Customer Success=Documentation Success," gave me two ideas that are beneficial to working in teams. First, the idea of being a part of a user community creates a direct link between the technical communicators, subject matter experts, and the customers. There's more transparency, users will feel like they're part of a process of improving their experience with the company and its products. In addition, a prospective customer is turned into a new customer, then a regular customer, and finally a brand evangelist. The ultimate goal, Lacerte explains, is for someone to become an evangelist to spread the good a company does through word of mouth, to widen the customer base. The benefit of "leaning in" to the users, from the company's perspective is, it makes them stand out from their competitors as a group that wants to listen to what users have to say, and they are more transparent and honest about their practices and products. I will tell my students about the "leaning in" technique as they begin to document their devices for iFixit.

Autodesk and A2Z did a great job sponsoring the event. The former even brought this large Jenga game, which became a teambuilding activity for the conference. I had a chance to play. I fortunately did not cause the tower to collapse, despite what the photo implies. All members had to work together to build a high tower and not knock it over, building trust in each other and it showed our thought process, both aloud and internally.