Highlights: Link the European Green Deal and its Circular Economy Action Plan with technical communication and information for use
Getting familiar with draft legislations that rely on information for the sustainable product use
IEC/IEEE 82079-1 as tool for achieving and promoting sustainable product use
Highlights: 1. Problems and Solutions in Structuring Analytical Technical Documents
2. Sharing document practices based on open source projects and automated quality control
3. Discuss the application of AIGC in the process of technical communication
Highlights: 1. Introduce how YiCAT can help enterprises complete the comprehensive process management of translation and localization.
2. Use cases in actual projects to introduce YiCAT’s solutions for helping enterprises achieve continuous localization.
3. Focus on AI technology and describe the application scenarios of AI in YiCAT, especially how YiCAT uses ChatGPT to help users improve work efficiency.
Highlights: The presentation explores the key benefits of cross-functional partnerships, including the opportunity to build a more diverse network, gain exposure to new perspectives and ideas, and broaden the tech writers' skills and knowledge.
The presentation addresses the following pain points:
• Difficulty in communicating value and impact of one's work to different departments.
• Inefficient and siloed teamwork resulting in missed opportunities and potential delays.
• Limited opportunities for professional growth and development.
• Struggles in building effective relationships with colleagues from different departments.
• Difficulty in accessing the resources and support needed to successfully complete projects.
Through building cross-functional partnerships, the presentation aims to help participants overcome these pain points and improve their ability to effectively communicate their value and impact, collaborate more efficiently and effectively, and access the resources and support needed to succeed in their role.
First, the presentation focuses on why it is important for writers to build these partnerships. There are several teams within a software development company that technical writers can collaborate with to gather more customer feedback about the product and documentation, including the customer support, user experience, technical marketing, technical training, and sales teams. These teams are in constant contact with customers or are internal customers of the product documentation and might have valuable information for the technical writers especially in companies where the writers have limited access to the customers' feedback.
In larger companies, people are so focused on delivering their tasks and meeting deadlines that they rarely have time to reach out to others outside of their direct dependencies. This is often the reason why important information is lost between teams. However, technical writers can access valuable information if they show their colleagues the added value they bring. Attendees learn how to identify the right individuals and teams to work with and how to approach and establish successful partnerships. The presentation also covers strategies for effectively communicating and collaborating with partners, and how to handle potential challenges that might arise. Key element in the presentation is the concept of mutual benefits for both parties in a collaboration and the presentation provides ideas for such benefits and how to pitch such a collaboration to the respective teams.
The presentation encourages participants to reflect on the value they bring to the table and how they can leverage this value to build cross-functional partnerships. This involves understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, identifying opportunities to collaborate, and finding ways to contribute to the success of your organization.
By the end of this presentation, attendees have a clear understanding of how to build cross-functional partnerships that can help them reveal their value and achieve their professional goals. They leave with practical tools, tips, and strategies that they can immediately put into action to start building more productive and impactful partnerships. This presentation is ideal for professionals at all levels who want to advance their careers and make a meaningful difference in their organizations.
Highlights: We'll introduce the audience with how to create a training for visual effectiveness for their teams based on our own experience with creating such a training. This workshop provides both theoretical knowledge and practical exercises that will help you to effectively build and lead a team for developing visual training materials. The workshop consists of the following parts:
Problem statement. The challenges most writers face when trying to increase the visual effectiveness of their content:
- Technical writers experience difficulties to determine which types of visuals to implement for their content, as well as what is the optimal number and place for these visuals.
- Most technical writers believe they don't have good design skills.
- Lack of appropriate and comprehensive trainings for visual effectiveness specifically targeted at technical communicators.
- Lack of knowledge about common design principles, tools, as well as unclear procedures and standards for implementing visuals in a doc set.
- Lack of predefined graphic templates which the technical communicators can effectively use.
The solution. Technical communications teams can create visual effectiveness trainings that address the specific needs of the writers and are aligned with the company's overall standards, strategy, and vision. We'll describe the process that teams can follow to create their own visuals training based on our experience:
- Form a team and determine the training development process.
- Determine the project objective, measurements, and possible threats.
- Organize the work between the team members.
- Create the first training draft.
- Pilot project – organization, collecting, and implementing feedback.
- Launch the training program.
- Maintain the training program - conducting follow-up surveys to constantly improve the training program
- Tips and tricks about how to lead the team toward success and keep their motivation strong. We'll also discuss ways to advertise your training.
Fun facts during the project:
- Ways to show appreciation and build the team - e-Card recognition
- Creating a project horoscope
- A personal gift surprise to show the leader's gratitude.
TAKEAWAYS: Think to the process rather than in the details
Reduce Time To Market of product and services
Increase efficiency reducing to zero redundant steps
Learn how to better talk to other Knowledge Workers
Highlights: Technical communication is not limited to user manual writing, online help composing, or API reference polishing. The way of thinking in technical communication also applies to far more areas, for example, email communication, which is very common in everyone's daily work. This workshop tries to show the new world of TC methodology application and way of thinking in daily work communication, addressing the following questions:
-Why should we apply TC methodology in business email communication?
-What are the possible misunderstanding and common mistakes we need to avoid in email communication? I don’t mean grammar.
-Is there any simple “checklist” to communicate “professionally and effectively” via email, despite different audiences and communication scenarios?
-Can I get all the above skills and perspectives in interesting games and hands-on exercises? Better if I can get timely comments about my email writing at the workshop.
-More to explore.
See how we could enhance our communication (including email) with various audiences in daily business communication using TC methodology. And surely you can do it too.
Highlights: There is a quite a hype around the topic of ChatGTP these days. Everyone seems to talk about how it can revolutionize the way we create and provide help to the users of our software. But ChatGPT and Large Language Models in general are not magical tools, but it's all about mathematics and training.
In this session, we will
• Open the LLM's lid and have a closer look at how they work
• Discuss the hype, the opportunities, but also the myths of what LLMs can do for enabling users
• Share some use cases where LLMs can support technical writers
Highlights: The application scenarios of ChatGPT in technical communication keep up with the current AI development trend. It applies the latest technology products to the technical communication industry, optimizes working methods, improves work efficiency, solves some pain points that are difficult for a single person to deal with, and explores possible opportunities and development directions.
Highlights: Attendees will come away from the talk better equipped to convert technical documentation formats by using Python. They will strengthen their technical knowledge of DITA, MadCap Flare, XML, Python programming, and software development. Nick will discuss the below points:
agile development; pain points of Flare’s DITA import wizard; differences between DITA and Flare: topics, conrefs, variables, TOCs, glossary, index; software development environment; Python libraries: lxml, pandas, pathlib, re (regular expressions); modular code; and creating a one-click application.
Highlights: Learn whether and how nudging, the small behavioural economic nudges, can be used in technical communication.
Highlights: 1.This workshop will provide a hands-on experience of the localization process for multilingual documents, and allows participants to appreciate the charm of ‘translation memories’, ‘term bases’, ‘machine translation’, and cutting-edge AI functions that assist in translation.
2.This workshop will help you discover how Sangfor Technologies Inc., the leading domestic network security and cloud computing service provider, leverages translation platforms and resources to deliver high-quality multilingual content with teamwork and collaboration.
3.Taking YiCAT Help Center as an example, the workshop will illustrate how to build a Help Center using open source code. In this way, the original text can be efficiently assigned to translators, and the translated text can be quickly published online. By presenting practical cases, the workshop highlights how enterprises can reduce costs and increase efficiency through YiCAT.
4.This workshop will also introduce flexible and configurable Open API solution provided by YiCAT, through which more possibilities for translation and localization are explored.
Highlights: What EU is asking to the enterprises in terms of Energy Label and Chemical Hazardous components
How to comply with European regulations
How knowledge management and technical documentation experience can be useful in this new area.
Highlights: The presentation will start with a problem statement including a discussion on the following areas that represent the technical communicators' pain points when creating graphics for their publications:
Low number or even complete lack of visuals in a technical documentation due to:
Technical communicators do not know where to start, what type of visuals to implement, and where is the most appropriate place in a document
Lack of skills to create visual elements – which graphic tools to use and how to work with them
Lack of knowledge about the common design principles
Lack of visual consistency that leads to bad user experience with the documentation
Various or inappropriate graphic tools being used when creating or updating visuals
The second part of the presentation will focus on identifying the best practices when creating graphics as follows:
Common design principles when creating diagrams – compositional flow, colors, shapes, font size, proportion of elements, whitespaces, alignment, proximity, arrows, legibility, and so on
Attributes that each visual element should consist of – titles, labels, icons, and so on
Ways to highlight important areas of a visual element
Ways to determine the complexity of a diagram and represent it in the most appropriate manner
The third and final part of the presentation will provide the audience with useful information about:
- What to consider and what questions to ask yourself before your start creating visuals
- Where and how to check whether the colors you use are compliant with the accessibility standards for people with sight impairment
- Additional information about how the visual elements in your publication improve your documentation SEO
Highlights: What is composable content?
Improving the UX of technical documentation at Contentful.
Summary of impact on UX.
Highlights: We did some monthly document reports, content promotion, and content revisions, but we did not analyze the problems with process thinking and data analysis thinking.
How to solve the above problems? We have four practical cases:
1. If you have done one thing but the result is not good, how to use data to define where the problem is?
2. If you want to achieve a goal, how to use data to evaluate and specify the best path to achieve it?
3. Guess user preferences and habits through data
4. Define the user life cycle
Highlights: - Changing Roles of Writer and Reader
- Reading to Decide, Writing for Scannability
- Combining Visual and Textual Codes
Highlights: 1) The presentation makes the audience feel refreshed and inspired. The audience would be curious about how SAP developed the solution and consider if its organization could learn from this process.
2) Speakers present many of the pain points of the previous traditional approach to linguistic quality testing and the difficulties of producing and translating screenshots in documentation.
3) The presentation includes cutting-edge trends and innovative perspectives. SAP and Rigi are using the latest technology to create new language quality testing scenarios.
4) The presentation includes best practices too. SAP has used this option for more than 30 pilot projects, which were put into production in September 2020. This solution addresses real problems and can become industry best practices.
The premier gathering event for all decision-makers and specialists in the field of technical communication in China.
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