Main conference presentation

Enriching audiences and organizations with clear and useful content

Thom Haller

Saturday March 24 2007, 5:00 - 5:45PM

Content doesn’t have to suck. User-focused process can guide us as we craft text for documents and for re-use. We can attend to how people process information and create focused content that supports people in accomplishing what they want to accomplish.

In this session you will learn a structure for combining the literature of the field in such a way that we can explain to our bosses and colleagues why structure at the sentence, paragraph, and pattern level matters to humans. We can show how our work supports improvements in user and organizational performance.

Specifically, you will accomplish the following objectives:

• Identify an easy-to-use structure for thinking about how people use information; relate specific content heuristics to this structure; and see how you can incorporate these strategies to help users GAIN.
• Explore a five-phased performance-focused structure for product development; use this lens of "GECKO" for chunking your work into a vocabulary of gathering, evaluating, chunking, knowing, and optimizing.
• Revisit structural patterns in text, and learn the "top five strategies" for improving clarity in content.

As a participant, you’ll hear stories and have opportunities for interaction. You'll laugh. You'll learn. Who said structure had to be dull?