About The Conference

• Date: April 1, 2006
• Location: Niagara Falls, NY
• Register Now
• Interview with Scott Ambler

Keynotes

• Put Testing Where It Belongs--At the End by Brian Marick
• Dead Fish Can't Swim But They Can Float Down a Waterfall by Tim Lister
• Extreme Programming Uninstalled by Ron Jeffries
• Super Model Driven Architecture: An Update From the OMG by Tyra Banks

Contact Information

The Waterfall Alliance
PO Box 1970
Cascade, Illinois

E-mail us

Sponsors

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Pedantic Information Delivery

Mark Janney

If your users only grasped how technologically advanced and feature-rich your product was, they would happily dive seven levels into your navigation scheme to find it. As research has shown, however, users are uneducated and lazy. Many aren't even aware that your data is stored in multiple databases, which are actually flat files that don't talk to each other. Therefore, it is incumbent upon you, the expert, to educate them.

In this session, you will learn techniques that really make your users learn all the bells and whistles of your product offering:

• Marketing unpopular add-on services in the middle of critical tasks
• Avoiding user errors by asking if they're really sure they want to do that
• Creating Flash tutorials on "How to Read Your Bill" and "Logging On"
• Sequential Help topics with disabled Close functionality
• Introductory Text: If they have to scroll past it, they're sure to read it
• OK/Submit/Go: How using different words for the same task will increase your users' vocabulary and pique their interest
• "But Our Users Are Smart": Why a cell biologist or rocket scientist will automatically understand your specialized field of expertise
• Creating error messages that clearly demonstrate "how the sausage is made"