Split over Splits

At NI we have a company-wide style guide. One of the weirdest things about it, and something which I've had the most trouble getting used to, is the guideline against splitting verbs.

Before I came to NI, I'd write a sentence like this:

You can also double-click the Add function.

But now I write like this:

You also can double-click the Add function.

Also:

You must manually specify the value.

Becomes:

You must specify the value manually.

See the differences? I had no idea that people wrote things like "also can" until I started at NI. And I disagree with the way it sounds and looks. (At least, for the first example. I can understand the way we rewrite the second one.) But since then I've noticed many other publications, such as the ESPN Magazine, do the same thing. I guess my brain had skipped over this construction before, but now that I actually have to write this way, I notice it more.

When I had the chance to write the documentation for MATRIXx 8.0, I decided against using this guideline. I just think it looks/sounds weird. But when I switched back to LabVIEW-based products, I had to ease back into using this construction again. Every time I start writing "can also," it's like I have to flip my brain around. I'm getting used to it again. I still think it looks weird and don't like using it. But now that I've seen other places use it, maybe I don't mind it so much.

I know some people don't care about verb-splitting, but others really enforce the "rule" against it. Our company-wide style guide is a communal effort that involves input from all the technical writing product groups. At least one time that I know of, we've voted to remove the restriction on splitting verbs. But even though the company style guide might say this, the product-specific style guide (which is our first point of reference) might disagree. Even if that isn't the case, your manager who reviews your content might not want the verbs split.

Anyway, just some random commentary on something that I find odd :-)

The LabVIEW Documentation that Anyone Can Edit

I don't know how I missed this, and I apologize for not posting it sooner! For those of you who are familiar with wikis, the LAVA (LabVIEW Advanced Virtual Architects) group has a wiki for LabVIEW. I encourage you all to go and contribute your knowledge to this compendium. Communication among customers about LabVIEW always is a good thing. It will be interesting to see how this wiki compares to and/or augments the documentation produced just around the corner from me at NI :-)

It's an interesting idea for official NI documentation, too. For example, see the MSDN wiki that I posted about a year ago. It's good to see this kind of thing spring up organically among customers.

Improving the Readability of Text Online

A company called Walker Reading Technologies has produced research showing that the human brain is not "wired" to read text in the traditional way we print it, which is in blocks. In short, we're constantly filtering out text that surrounds what we're trying to actually read. This filtering impedes our comprehension of the material.

Supposedly, the optimal format is a series of "short, cascading phrases" that look really odd but are easier for the human brain to comprehend. Of course, Walker Research makes a product that reformats text in this manner automatically :-) Apparently the company has improved some test scores by simply putting tests in this new format. A major textbook publisher also has contracted Walker Research for help with online textbooks.

I'm skeptical about company-conducted research that conveniently provides an excuse for purchasing a product from the same company. But the theory is still interesting. NI does a lot of documentation "online," meaning shipped as HTML. And the very essence of our jobs depends on readers comprehending the material. Maybe this new theory means we'll someday

be writing documentation

like this?

Edit: A link to the ensuing Slashdot discussion.

A Guide to LabVIEW Documentation, Part 1

As part of a great effort between our technical writers and the SW developers, LabVIEW has multiple entries into the LabVIEW Help. The LabVIEW Help itself is huge, which is mostly a function (hah!) of the number of things you can do with LabVIEW. Additionally, because many LabVIEW customers use the product to make other products, we have to account for a lot of use cases, generalities, and assumptions about what people actually do with LabVIEW. (That's why we try as much as possible to get feedback from users, but that's an issue for another post entirely.)

In this next series of posts, I'm going to cover the various ways in which you can access the LabVIEW Help from inside and outside the software itself. Here's the most general way.

Start>>All Programs>>National Instruments>>Labview xx: Going here shows you three useful entries: LabVIEW Help, LabVIEW Manuals, and Readme. The first link opens lvhelp.chm, which is located in the labview\help\ directory. ( where labview is the directory to which you installed LV.)

This help file is the gateway to just about anything you could want to find in the LabVIEW Help. Starting with LabVIEW 8, the technical writers made a decision to stop splitting content into PDF and HTML source. We decided to make (nearly) every topic available from within the HTML-based LabVIEW Help. We kept a couple of PDF and printed manuals, but who knows how long those will last? (The switching process itself was large, complex, and often painful. Maybe that's a subject for another post.)

The LabVIEW Help is modular and extensible. We use Microsoft's HTMLHelp framework (and FAR to do all the work of compiling and managing settings). Every time you install a LabVIEW add-on, such as the LabVIEW Real-Time Module or the LabVIEW Simulation Interface Toolkit, another book (or, more likely, several books) appears in the LabVIEW Help's table of contents. So whether you're looking for help on an FPGA topic or for information about the Control Design Construct State-Space Model VI, the LabVIEW help is your one-stop shop.

In fact, the lvhelp.chm file itself is mostly a reference to other install .chm files. For example, in the labview\help\ directory, glang.chm contains most of the VI & function reference information. glang = G Language, get it? :-)

lvhelp.chm "includes" both of these files (and many more), so the lvhelp.chm file itself contains very little content -- mostly just the legal and high-level organization topics.

The second link takes you to the labview\manuals\ directory. If LabVIEW or an add-on installs PDF manuals, those manuals will show up in this directory. Because of the aforementioned shift to HTML-based documentation, not too many add-ons use this folder. LabVIEW itself does, and two of my products (the Control Design Toolkit and the PID Control Toolkit) still install PDF manuals here. But products like RT and FPGA produce almost no PDF documentation anymore.

PDFs come and go all the time. For example, in the Simulation Module 2.0 release, we shipped a PDF manual. For the subsequent release, Simulation Module 8.20 (the version number jumped up to be consistent with LabVIEW's), I converted the PDF into HTML (like magic!). Some other groups in NI are doing the reverse; going from HTML documentation to PDF and/or printed documentation. It's all based on what works best for the customer.

The third link is to the labview\readme\ folder. I'm pretty sure that all LV add-ons install readme.html files, and these files get placed into this folder. (Of course the files are all named differently so they don't overwrite one another.) Readmes typically contain installation instructions (because the readmes are visible on the top level of the installation CD), information about new features, bug fixes from previous versions, last-minute documentation updates, and known issues with the current version. However, the presence or absence of this information differs from product to product, even among LabVIEW and its add-ons. In addition, some developers prefer to write their own readmes, whereas some prefer to hand off the readmes to us technical writers.

Horn Tooting

I opened my inbox this morning and found an email from my dad. He congratulated me because NI made FORTUNE magazine's "Top 100 Companies to Work For" list for the 8th consecutive year. I seem to remember that last year we were higher in the rankings, but being in the list is a good thing all by itself. It would have been neat to have been able to participate in the employee survey, but it's randomly distributed. I know people who have been here 10+ years who haven't ever been contacted.

Austin-based Whole Foods ranked #5. Go Austin!!!

Another funny tidbit is that Texas Instruments (TI), the company for whom NI is most often mistaken (don't worry, I did it too), is listed right below us.

Who is #1? Of course, that spot belongs to the six-million-dollar-a-share GOOG. I have to say though that free spa treatments would not necessarily attract me to a company. Free meals, however, are a different story :-)

NI-TC 2006

Every year at NI, we have an internal conference for all the employees in the Technical Communications department. This conference, conveniently enough called NI-TC (for NI-Tech Comm) is in late October and lasts for two days. It's a time for us to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on the department. We have multiple presentations/seminars, a demo fair that showcases the neat products we work on, and (of course) a deck party with food, drink, and music. This year we had some cameras floating around, so I wanted to share the event with you...

Breakfast on Day 1 consisted of bagels, cream cheese, and a big fruit tray. Oh, and coffee of course! Breakfast on Day 2 was a plethora of breakfast tacos. Mmmm.



A group of us getting ready for the first presentation in the morning.

This year, we all voted on superlative awards, like "Most Likely to Build a VI for Home Use" and "Most Likely to Out-Nerd an Engineer." Yeah, it's dorky, but it's fun :-) Here we see Nick distributing a prize pinwheel to Kyle while Kip looks on.



Another group of us between presentations.



Colin (r) and me about to give our presentation. Colin's in marketing, so he's no stranger to a suit. But me being in R&D, well, let's just say I wear suits for only family occasions :-) But when you're presenting to a team of co-workers, it never hurts to look snappy, right? I thought it would be funny, given that I dress so casually all the time. Some people got the joke, but some didn't. In R&D, you wear a suit only when you interview!



Some of us watching a presentation on how Windows Vista's online help is different from XP's.



This is the demo fair, and we have Mark demonstrating the NI Vision Builder for Automated Inspection.



Again at the demo fair. Bradley gives us a hands-on sneak peek at Windows Vista.



Okay, the learning is over and it's time for the deck party!



One of our tech writers (Robert, on the left with the bass) plays in a local band called The Hackles. They graced our deck party and played some good ol' country music for us.

What We Do All Day

6-7 years ago, NI created a website, in partnership with Texas Tech University, that walks you through A Week in the Life of a Technical Communicator. Because the design is so 90s, and because the "star" of the web site is no longer with NI, in January 2006 a group of writers decided to update the site with a more "modern" look. (Wow, that's a lot of quotes here.)

The result is a new-and-improved A Week in the Life of a Technical Writer (notice the title change) web site. The goal of this site is to explain what we do all day. We have two audiences in mind: 1) prospective employees and 2) students who are unaware of what technical writing is - or at least what we say it is, because the job title can mean many things depending on where you work.

Creating the site was an interesting exercise in collaboration and group work. It took us longer than we'd anticipated to decide who to "feature" on the site, come up with a design, write the content, decide on the page navigation, and so on. We unveiled the site on Sept 8th, 2006, after nine months of planning and implementation. Some of the group members are currently writing an article for the STC's Intercom magazine based on the effort.

Anyway, check it out!

Guest Appearance on the VI Road Show

Every Halloween, the LabVIEW team sets up various demos of our products for other members of the company. This year, the VI Road Show invaded and caught some of what went on. The following video shows Varun, myself, and Alex discussing and demonstrating the LabVIEW Simulation Module. Beware the horrible scrolling CRT monitors!

P.S: I feel I should explain my bloody face :-) My costume this year was Ash from Army of Darkness.

Not an Engineer

I was re-reading the post about April's interview in the Statesman, and the last sentence stuck out at me:

...the fact that she is not a programmer or engineer serves her well as a tech writer.

This phrase is very true. I said the very same thing to a class of students at UTSA last fall, and I find myself thinking it at the career fairs I've been to recently. Many job applicants hear "technical writer," or sees what NI does, and think "I'm not a programmer" or "I'm not an engineer." To these students, I say, good.

We need more non-engineers and non-programmers looking at our products: testing them, writing about them, and polishing them via documentation or other means. We need creative people with non-technical backgrounds to push back on the developers and say "This isn't designed well" or "If I can't understand it, how will a customer?" After all, just because we're a tech company, that doesn't mean all our customers are technology oriented. Engineers and programmers are trained a certain way, which doesn't always include ease of use or user-friendliness. That's (part of) our job. So in these cases, being a non-techie is very beneficial.

So we don't need, or sometimes even want, you to be tech-savvy when applying for the open technical writer positions we have (hint, hint). When we're interviewing or looking at resumes, what we are looking for is that you are interested in technology or are curious or passionate about it. We don't need you to come in and start writing C++ immediately - that's for the programmers.

We do, however, expect you to come in and start writing English immediately :-)

The VI Road Show

Welcome the newest NI Blog member - the VI Road Show. This is actually a vlog (video blog) that will take you around the country (and possibly world) as the owners showcase NI's employees and customers.

Interview w/April Brinkmeyer

The Austin American-Statesman recently interviewed a co-worker of mine, April Brinkmeyer. She is a technical writer for the LabVIEW core product. Here's a snippet:

Writing, reviewing, updating and improving the program's extensive help documentation in-program, in print and online is an on-going project for Brinkmeyer and the others on the documentation team. She also sits on committees that are tasked with improving help systems across the board and ensuring consistency. Though Brinkmeyer went through an intensive training program and had to learn several new applications, the fact that she is not a programmer or engineer serves her well as a tech writer.

UI, Documentation, and Polish

I'm not sure how it is at other places, but part of being a technical writer at NI is dealing with usability. We are often the first non-engineers/non-developers to see a feature in action. We come across many malformed and confusing dialog boxes, interface widgets, organizational structures, and so on. In LabVIEW we have a great usability advocate in Christina Rogers, who recently made a post about usability and UI. She's also documented many of the UI issues and standards that developers should take into consideration when implementing a feature. Having been present at numerous discussions of "What should this dialog box look like?" I certainly appreciate her work and guidance! She also serves as the arbiter on many UI issues, like, "Should this dialog box button say Close, Finish, or Exit?" It sounds like a trivial question, but as Christina can tell you, issues like these can profoundly affect the user experience and perception of our product.

I bring all this up because of a recent post on Ars Technica about Microsoft's last-minute polish of the Vista UI. Look at the two shots of the dialog box side by side. The Change button is now Rename. The Network ID button is now Join. The text accompanying each button has also been simplified. These are the kinds of changes that we, as technical writers at NI, deal with and have influence over.

(On a side note, you'll notice that I bold the name of buttons you click on -- this is a side effect of writing with NI's company style guide in mind for so long!)

The post about Vista relates to NI in so many ways. Like Windows, LabVIEW is NI's flagship product, the one with the most visibility. Obviously LV is not as big (in market dollars or in lines of code) as Vista, but still. The article's point about last-minute bugs being expensive to fix is a valid one. We have to deal with all those bullet points too, except for the Accessibility one. This is why technical writers are so important in catching/addressing usability issues as early as possible -- the earlier we file a request to change a UI, the less money it costs to fix the issue. At crunch time you have so many people doing so many different things that issues like these often get neglected or deferred in favor of more "Showstopper" issues. Not to mention the overall added stress on the developers during crunch time.

My point is this: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? This is what I tell myself when I file a bug report to a developer over a trivial little issue, like a radio button that should be a checkbox, or a text box that is too short, or a dialog box title bar that doesn't make any sense. This is also what I tell myself when I recompile a .CHM file to rearrange the words in a single sentence, fix one misspelled word, or resize a single image. All these little issues add up to a more professional product that I'm proud of being involved with.

Along the same lines ...

Last month I attended the Austin Game Conference, in which Blizzard VP of Game Design Rob Pardo spoke about Blizzard's legendary "polish," or the overall impression that you're using a well-developed professional product. He said that polish is not something you can just add at the last minute, or even at the last month. It has to be built into the software plan from the beginning. He also said that polish is not just one single thing, like the speed of World of Warcraft's mouse cursor or the shading on the menu bars. Polish is a combination of thousands of little decisions that all get implemented during the development cycle.

This part of his speech stuck with me, because it reminded me of what we tell developers when we hassle them about UI and documentation issues. Sure, in the grand scheme of LabVIEW, nobody cares if a button is labeled Close, Finish, or Exit. They all do the same thing, right? But if we can guide the user on the path they want to take, or anticipate their move and help them make it through intuitive UI design, that adds to the polish. Same with the documentation. No one's going to not buy LabVIEW if we misspell a word in the help. Along the same lines, we've shipped versions of LV that don't include any help for a given feature. I highly doubt that this situation affected sales.

But high-quality UI and documentation adds to the overall presentation of the product and helps users complete their tasks. All the hundreds of little things add up to make LabVIEW a more professional, usable, and complete product.

Bloggers vs. High Schoolers in Writing Competition

/. has a bit this morning about bloggers competing with high schoolers on the SAT essay. If you like, you can even rate the bloggers' submissions yourself!

Here's the essay question, timed at 20 minutes:

Directions: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.'

-- Booker T. Washington

Assignment: What is your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

Interviewing

Since the day I started at NI, I knew I wanted to be involved in recruiting technical writers. We have a dedicated HR department at NI, but the people you see at career fairs are regular full-time employees. I like this method much better than having recruiters represent us, because I know more about technical writing at NI than the HR people do. Therefore, when students come up to me or I give a presentation, I can answer questions more effectively than someone in HR can. (It's not a "better" skillset, it's just a different one.)

So if you're at a career fair and see an NI booth, you'll likely be speaking with people who actually do the job you're talking about. Sometimes it's a strain on us, because we have actual projects to be working on, and it'd free up a lot of our time if we didn't have to be involved in recruiting. But the end result is worth it. I think our candidates and new employees are of a much higher caliber than they'd be if we didn't see them at all during the interview process.

Last year I did a couple class presentations and visits at UT San Antonio. I also wanted to go to Virginia Tech, but haven't been able to yet. So now I'm one of the three school sponsors for UT Austin. I'm in charge of maintaing our post on AccessUT, which is the job portal from Career Services. I also review resumes, interview candidates in our first round of interviews (there are two rounds), schedule and host candidates for "onsite" interviews (the second round), and pretty soon I'll be at UT's various career fairs for Business, Liberal Arts, and Communications schools.

I like the idea of contributing to NI in a sense other than documentation; recruiting is an additional skillset that makes me a valuable employee. I like meeting and interacting with people, especially new college graduates, which is where we focus the majority of our recruiting efforts. It also helps that I genuinely enjoy NI and my job, so I'm not faking it when I pitch the company to people!

Maybe sometime soon I'll post about what we look for in tech writers, resume tips, interviewing tips, and things like that.

Updates and More

It's been a little while since my last post, so here's what's happening:

• A group of technical writers and I put the finishing touches on A Week in the Life of a Technical Writer. This web site follows 4 technical writers (and 1 manager) through a "typical" week at NI. I say "typical" because there is hardly a typical day here at work :-)
• I got promoted just ahead of my two-year anniversary here, which is great :-) So now I'm a Staff Technical Writer, which probably doesn't mean much to anyone outside the company, but it means that I have an increased set of expectations/responsibilities for my job.
  
• Three of my products released to manufacturing at the same time, which was a bit stressful but otherwise great. It's always a good feeling to get some help files out the door. The stressful part was managing about 10 separate help files as they went through our signoff and verification processes. But that's over now and we're all in the planning phases for the next versions. Work continues on two additional products I'm assigned to.
• I signed up two new LV tech writers to blog here, but they haven't posted yet, so I won't say anything about them until they do.
• I started interviewing candidates for the technical writing position at NI. (Yes, we are hiring! Send in those resumes!)

I also just added a subscription feed for those of you with RSS/Atom readers. The link is on your right, just under the Description of the blog. So now you can read my ramblings without even visiting this site!

Brian Powell, a LabVIEW software engineer with almost 20 years of experience on the team, has joined the blogging crew. Welcome, Brian!

Vlogging

Brian and Colin are putting together a vlog (video blog) for NI Week. They'll be running around the Austin Convention Center all 3 days and capturing most of it on camera. Make sure your hair looks good!

NIWeek 2006

NIWeek is upon us yet again, and it looks like it's going to be fun. If you've been before you know that the keynote speeches and demos are worth getting up at 8 AM for. I've seen several of the keynote demos already, because one is being done by my group, and they're all pretty interesting. Unfortunately I don't think Virginia Tech will be doing a demo like they did last year. However, this year we have Dean Kamen (aka Mr. Segway) speaking, which will be worth attending all by itself. Hopefully we'll also show some more spinning buzzsaws and bouncing ball bearings.

There will be a spot at the LabVIEW Zone on the expo floor that focuses on the NI blogs. Apparently there will also be pictures of the bloggers on the walls; I got my headshot taken a couple weeks ago. It was done in the same secret room where they take all the product pictures for the catalog & website.

If you want to stop by the LV Zone and say hello, I should be around there quite a bit, along with the other bloggers. I promise I won't talk to you about commas and grammar.

You can also be sure that there will be many a mention of LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT. This project has been one of the coolest things about working here, and we're finally going to show it to everyone. If you like programmable robots (and who doesn't?) don't miss any of those sessions or demos.

LabVIEW and Music, again

Last December I spoke with the editor of createdigitalmusic.com about using LV + the DSP Module to make some weird noises. A couple weeks ago he emailed me with a question about that post (which actually came from one of our customers), and the answer evolved into this new post about using LabVIEW itself as a sound application. Having just attended the Summer NAMM show here in Austin, I feel the synergy is complete.

Documentation 2.0

Raise your hand: who's heard of Web 2.0? This is the phenomenon that spawned sites like Google, flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Myspace, and many other "killer apps" for today's Internet. Even Web stalwarts like eBay, Amazon, and Slashdot predicted Web 2.0 long before it existed by making user comments crucial to the site's operation.

There are several discussions as to what Web 2.0 actually is, but the consensus seems to be that Web 2.0 consists of sites that a) run more like applications and b) contain content that is largely defined by users.

Think about Google. How does it provide all the content that it searches? It doesn't; a globe full of Internet users provide the content. And yet Google has stock worth like $380 a share. It provides none of the content; only mechanisms for searching and organizing that content. The same goes for Wikipedia. It falls on the Wikipedia users to provide all the content for the site. Without users, the site is useless. Same with flickr and del.icio.us. Collaboration is the key.

I write about this phenomenon for a couple reasons, but I share it on this blog because Microsoft released their own wiki on MSDN last week. The wiki consists of documentation for Visual Studio and .NET products. Each page is written by Microsoft's technical writers, but because this is a wiki, users can add their own comments to each page.

I really like this idea. I imagine that LabVIEW users know way more about how LV works than the technical writers do. That' s not a slight against my co-workers; rather, it's a recognition of the fact that we are limited by company resources and time. Users, on the other hand, play with a single LabVIEW version for years, while we have to move on the next project once the current one is finished. Not to mention that users actually use LabVIEW. Sure, there are one or two tech writers who can handle G programming, and we all take the LabVIEW Basics courses that NI offers. We use several VIs to help us with our numerous documentation processes. But our focus is on writing, not programming. I'm pretty sure that none of us have developed a test & measurement application.

Imagine if you opened up a user manual and noticed an error in the documentation. Or you notice that, based on your own experience with the product, a key piece of information is missing. If you're dilligent, you send feedback to NI, and a year or so later, you see the corrected material in the new version of the user manual.

Now rewind and imagine opening up that user manual and noticing the error. You log on to your account at ni.com and locate the topic in question (which has been posted online in HTML form). You click the Comment button and post a quick note that details the problem with the topic.

Two days later you receive an RSS notification saying that someone has replied to your comment. It turns out a small engineering company in the Midwest was using the same product incorrectly because the user manual is insufficient or erroneous. But, thanks to your correction, they went in a different direction and the project is moving ahead full steam. Over the next couple days you get several more replies from other users. Some ask questions about your post, and you reply. Some post scenarios where you have to do things differently than the manual describes. Others point out inaccuracies that you yourself had not noticed. A developer explains why certain quirks are present and announces that he's filed a request to change the behavior.

A year later, all pertinent information has been incorporated into the next version of the user manual, and even more people benefit. You gain self-satisfaction and a reputation as a trustworthy expert who knows the inner workings of LabVIEW. Other users gain insight into how to use a particular feature. R&D, sales, and marketing folks gain evidence about how customers use their features. Marketing gains site traffic and credibility. (IT gains another server to handle the load.) Technical writers gain useful, valuable content that trickles down to other users who don't check ni.com. NI gains a positive reputation and tangible financial benefit.

All for nothing.

It could happen, right?

This is how I imagine documentation working, except I don't have to imagine it anymore. What Microsoft has done is create an open environment for users to collaborate based on shared experiences. Similar to Wikipedia, the initiative might expose flaws in their documentation, but I imagine the overall gains (as described above) far outstrip that small setback. They are embracing Web 2.0. And MS isn't alone. Other products have similar functionality for their documentation.

NI has already launched community.ni.com which is a effort to leap into Web 2.0. On this site, users can submit VIs, comment on them, trade tips about them, rate them, and otherwise collaborate. I envision something happening for LabVIEW and other NI documentation.