Friday 3th February 2023 (remote)

Sponsored by UFR Etudes Interculturelles de Langues Appliquées and the Clillac-Arp research laboratory.

CC BY 2.0 frankieleon

Measuring Impact: What Makes Good Technical Communication

Technical communicators strive for creating content that is usable and helpful. But how can they be absolutely sure that they’ve been successful in achieving this goal? This year, we are happy to welcome speakers from Finland, Poland, Germany, the United States, and France to  explore methodologies and tools for measuring and validating quality :

• Systems for gathering user feedback and testing content usability
• Metrics for measuring content performance
• Quality review processes
• Heuristics and standard criteria for checking quality
• Before / after examples of content improvement initiatives

Video recordings of the presentations are available on YouTube.

Speakers

Barbara Kardel-Piątkowska (Etteplan, Poland)

Barbara is a linguist and information science graduate with experience in the translation industry as well as technical writing. She has been working as a technical author at Etteplan for 3 years.

Dipo Coker (Componize, France)

With over 16 years combining languages and IT as a technical writer and editor working in regulated industries (high-end medical devices and finance), Dipo blends his experience of authoring in structured and unstructured environments; migrating technical publications to DITA; and content strategy to help develop a best in class CCMS. Dipo holds an MA in Multimedia and Multilingual Document Design.

Suvi Isohella and Juho-Pekka Mäkipää (Vaasa University, Finland)

Suvi Isohella is a university teacher in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Vaasa, Finland. She teaches courses in technical communication and web accessibility and supervises B.A. theses within communication studies. In the department, she is the leader of the interdisciplinary Technical Communication program. Her research interests include user-centered technical communication, accessibility of textual web content, technical communication curriculum development, and minimalist document design.

Juho-Pekka Mäkipää is a university teacher of information systems at the School of Technology and Innovation at the University of Vaasa, Finland. He teaches courses in the field of web accessibility, human-computer interaction and user experience and supervises MSc theses in information systems. His research interests include theory and universality of web accessibility, human-computer interaction, and citizen science.

Craig Frayne (Palabra Technical, Germany)

Craig does freelance technical communication & design and is currently an API Technical Writer for the SCAYLE eCommerce platform at About You in Hamburg.

Karissa Van Baulen (Hotjar, US)

Karissa was a nominee for the “ACE Rising Star Award in Customer Education” for 2021 and has been featured on the “Knowledge Base Ninjas” podcast, presented at Support Driven, and spoke at multiple Write the Docs conferences. Her specialty is in help center and training content strategy. She was able to increase self service for learning content in the Hotjar help center by 75% by using Hotjar.

Michael Laudenbach (Carnegie Mellon University, US Pennsylvania)

Michael is a 4th-year PhD Candidate in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. His research draws from corpus linguistics methods and rhetorical theory to describe the variation of genres and registers in student writing. Specifically, he uses writing in the discipline of statistics & data science as a case study to address broader questions surrounding corpus-based approaches to genre-based writing instruction.