running with paper

Back in my customer service days, we had a trophy the office manager had made up of an old sports trophy, a nice red triangular rock, and googly eyes from the craft store. It was a silly award, given for good ideas in later or mockingly to mind-numbingly clueless customers, vendors, or ourselves …

I’ve been going through my papers for year-end, and came across a notebook I kept in my corporate days, listing the bug reports and software improvements I’d recommended over the previous year. I was aiming for one a week for a year but didn’t quite make my goal. I wonder if they took up any of the suggestions, or if any were in the pipeline and are now out there (even if I didn’t come up with it first).

And it’s funny; that’s why I started in this business – not liking some of the bugs and usability annoyances of software. Wanting to do something about it, and getting there by suggesting fixes and writing down what needed to be worked around, teaching my co-workers back in the day to use *NIX based software on terminals and in emulation environments.

Happy New Year, happy bug and feature hunting!

If you search for tips on improving slide decks and presentations, you usually find the same sort of tips. Keep it short. Keep it uncluttered. Stick with a palette from the company/software/package. Have your notes ready, know your deck cold, be able to do without it.

Very few seem to focus on a couple of problems I see over and over again, and I thought I’d try to address them here.

Lose the pastels. Light, bright colors that are in the same range are rather useless on screen. They print great in your color hand outs, they look nice on your screen, but across the room, they won’t show up well. And as a black and white print out, they’ll be useless shades of grey.

Don’t assume your audience has 100% color vision. A number of colleagues, including a few at recent classes and seminars, are color blind in some way. Use more than color to show your varied items: numbers, letters, arrows, or other keying information. Not sure how your colors look? Try this tool I found while searching for the answer to another client problem. (I’ve spoken to the creator about making it a more user-friendly tool – stay tuned.)

Double, even triple decking. Yes, it can be a lot of work – especially if you’re making changes up until the last minute. But you likely need to have more than one set of slides for your presentation.

One black and white set that will photocopy and distribute well.

One dark-room deck, usually with a white background.

One reversed deck a dark background with white text. One set of classes I took had lovely west facing windows along one side of the room, with no blinds. Morning classes were difficult, afternoon classes were blindingly painful. Other multi-purpose rooms and hey-let’s-make-it-a-lecture room rooms don’t have dimming capabilities, and you’re faced with a choice: complete dark or complete bright. Not ideal if your audience needs to take notes and weren’t prepared for a dark room.

Parallelism. Don’t make your audience remember. They can’t think that far back to twelve slides ago when you showed them Brand X and your wonderful idea. Show a before and after. Yes, it means duplication of slides in your deck because you can’t program a deck to show alternative threads, but seeing comparisons side by side is a powerful tool.

Repeat the question. Whether you’re live, recording, in a small group or large, repeat the question. This ensures you understand the question, the questioner knows you understand it, and that embarrassed guy in the back who had to silence ABBA right in the middle of Dancing Queen gets the question, as well.

Record yourself. Do this for yourself, with a test audience, and, if it won’t interfere with the final presentation, during the final presentation. Some times, despite the best efforts of a part-time cobbled-together A/V system, some of the information on the video will be dropped on the audio. Use these to remove uhs, uhms, and buts, or to capture questions from the test audiences to incorporate into later drafts. Or to provide transcripts (value-add!) to your presentation clients. Don’t record yourself using the presentation laptop – unless you’ve tested it to ensure you’re not overloading your system.

Most of the lectures, classes, and seminars I’ve attended lately were stellar. Great information, well laid out, but with a few problems beyond and within their control. It’s not just about giving information people can use, it’s about giving it in a usable, relatable, retainable format.

Happy presenting!

I went to my first digital “meetup” in gosh – 1992? Meeting folks from a local Bulletin Board and hanging out at a burger joint. Fourteen years later, my employer issued their first “blogging guidelines” and I stopped working so hard to keep my online and offline worlds apart. But I still had a small wall there; careful about the information I shared online and the connections made (mostly).

Then late last year, I finally joined Facebook. I’d tried Friendster, and Orkut, and Plaxo and even LinkedIn. But not MySpace – it hurts.

I held off on Facebook because people weren’t there at first, and because it was still “too open”. And even with privacy updates, just being there got you plugged into applications that your friends chose to use – not you chose – that your friend chose. And I didn’t like that. It was hard to “opt out”, unless you simply stayed away. Continue Reading »

I was digging through my “to blog about” pile and found this from last November …

The three o-clock blahs hit me hard the other day. I don’t handle the shortening days well, and my sleep had been disturbed by an allergy attack that kept trying to turn from mere sniffle and headache to the blinding pain of a migraine.

I headed into the communal kitchen to beseech the snack machine gods for a bite to eat; perk me out of the blahs. Nearby stood a co-worker, and in the course of my attempting to explain that it was three-o-clock, the milk-and-cookies hour, I glanced at the watch I’d hurriedly grabbed at a local discount store and realized that my wrist watch has no three.

Reminds me of a comic who had an irregular phone and calendar. My calendar has no Tuesdays, he explained. I would have called you but my phone has no five.

And here I am, in his very predicament. My watch has no three. In other ways it is an unremarkable Timex Water-Resistant Indiglo date and time watch with an inexpensive leather strap. Ran me under $30 at a local discount store.

But if this means no more milk-and-cookies-hour, it’s time for it to go. On the other hand, if it means I won’t be woken by a sick kid, pet, spouse, or neighbor, perhaps I should sell it to the highest bidder ….

I wrote this a few years ago for a friend asking about content management systems (CMS) and found it while helping another friend recently. For his needs I suggested http://www.joomla.org/ and http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ instead. For this repost, I’ve updated it slightly to reflect the experience I’ve gained in the interim and to address a more generic audience.

Subject: Some considerations for evaluating a CMS and your needs

Hey there, just to follow up our phone call …

We’ve been kicking around CMS talk too, here, and here’s a few thoughts that might be useful to keep in mind when you guys are figuring out what to get and what you need.

You already know what you have; from there figure out what works, what doesn’t, what you’d like to have. Define your goals and needs. List them out, and rank them in order of importance to each group of users and customers you have – internal and external.

Generally your goals and needs might dovetail into a list that meets your current needs and expands your offerings, while leaving room for more growth later. Maybe you’re looking to both redesign the site and allow a greater range of people to add content. You want your team and contributors to have varying levels of responsibility for the management of that content – without opening the floodgates to everyone editing the site, and overwhelming those responsible for managing the content.
Continue Reading »

I admit that as I’ve transitioned from writing on a manual typewriter to composing on the computer screen, I’ve become a bit lazy in my spellcheckery. Those little red dots are my clean up crew; some days too much so. And inevitably, an error or two can slip in, sometimes making your point a bit more poignantly than you intended. Or just embarrasses the heck out of you.

I’ve been doing some spring cleaning on my inbox, and found a few gems that even the spell checker couldn’t save me from:

I’d suggest a tired approach to people management …

immediately followed by …

At the bottom of the pyramid are simple users.

Because pyramids are all about the tiers, don’t you know. Not! As the recipient later pointed out, though, sometimes tiered management is rather tired.

Other times, I get full of myself. On a short “white paper” on domesticity, I went way out there:

One could write books about [subject]

Editors are great for helping keep your ego in check. If only Clippy had been that useful.

Have you hugged your editor today?

I just paid some guys $24.95 to gain a way for me to email an old colleague. Not only that, I didn’t know for certain who I was emailing, but I had a suspicion, based on his profile, “private” or not. Colleague, if you’re reading this, it was worth every penny.

I’ve used LinkedIn for a while, mostly as a “by the way, look me up on LinkedIn” comment, punctuating meet and greet conversations, wrapping up lunches or other encounters. Now I’m hearing from a number of employment professionals that it is a major employment hub along with a companion site, indeed.com. With the spate of layoffs in my neck of the woods, my connection list has been growing. Former coworkers, longtime friends, even a few “imaginary” people whom I’ve never met in real life (but if I ever get to Europe, look out, Danu!).

Since LinkedIn is the place to be, I’ve been beefing up my profile. Adding positions, skills, friends. Making recommendations, and seeking a few of my own, hence the search for a former colleague. And I think I found him, but I ran into a couple of problems: first, his profile was private. Second, I was out of “InMail” credits. Being in a bit of a hurry, I decided to pay the $24.95 for some InMail credits, but one friend suggested I talk to a LION.

Apparently, there are minmaxers on LinkedIn. These LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) are linking to everyone as much as possible, as fast as possible, to gain “net cred” and power at LinkedIn. The idea is that I link up with one or two of them (there are a couple of recruiters that have snuck into my alumni circles, so it wouldn’t be that hard) and in a few days, ding ding ding, this “Private” profile is easier to connect to and email for free.

But I didn’t want to wait. I paid the money and composed my message blindly (InMail gives you a choice of addressing the note as Name, or Dear Name if you’re feeling formal, and Hi, Name if you’re on the casual side), using the pronoun of you, hoping I had the right guy but not typing in his name. Off the mail went, and now I had to wait for a reply and to find out who I’d emailed.

If I’d been a little more patient, I could have run two queries, one on the company name and one on my colleague’s name, caught the match, and used his name in the email. I could have been a bit more targeted, asking him directly for another letter of reference on LinkedIn to replace the paper one I’d been given about a decade ago. Serves me right for doing this at 11pm at night, rather than approaching the problem with rested brain.

However, it’s done. And it turns out that my sleuthing, my comparing the “name” search to the “company” search wasn’t necessary. The blind InMail has a bit of a flaw: once you’ve sent the mail, you can view the message, complete with formerly private name showing. So much for a “private” profile. But if you want privacy, you shouldn’t put anything on the internet in the first place.

While I’m fond of wiggling everything until it works, breaks, or improves, I didn’t in this case. But if I had the InMails to spare, I’d revoke the email (now that I have “Private’s” name) to see if I got my credit back. You can get a lot of mileage out of a couple of measly InMail credits if that is the flaw in the ointment. Meantime, I’ve got more LinkedIng to do, if I ever stop being annoyed with the mountains of JavaScript that muck up my browser so.

There are several thousand search engines out there, folks.

They’re easy to use. If you’re reading this page, maybe you can use them, too!

1. Find a search engine, much in the same way you likely found this page.

2. Enter your idea/name in the search text box and click Go, or Search, or even just hit your Return/Enter key.

3. Realize that your new national campaign shares some name recognition with a well-known pregnancy preventative and go to, in this case, plan “C”, maybe?

Reminds me of the time the female boss was sending me to the store for one kind of pad and the male boss poked his head around the corner with his two cents worth to make sure I was getting the kind of pad he preferred.