DocTrain UX Update: Day One

Documentation and Training: The User Experience started today in beautiful Vancouver, BC. The first day of the event included three half-day workshops on topics including task analysis and information modeling for DITA (Alan Houser), customer-centric content management (Ann Rockley), and information design and architecture (Thom Haller). The sessions were jam-packed. Many more people than we imagined showed up to participate. Rooms were set to overflow capacity. Not a bad problem to have.

Of course, as one would expect at a user experience conference, we had our share of user experience challenges. Getting here was challenging for us. Bank of America turned off our charge card due to “unusual travel patterns” (much more on this story later). One attendee had a reservation confirmation from the hotel, but no reservation or room when she arrived (the hotel quickly found a more than satisfactory solution). And, the instructions for internet access (provided by the hotel) were not as clear as they could have been (so several attendees rewrote the instructions...given the audience you could have guessed that!)

Day Two kicks off with a keynote presentation featuring Salim Ismail, a successful angel investor and entrepreneur and is currently the Head of Brickhouse at Yahoo!. Brickhouse is Yahoo’s newly launched program for rapid product development. Salim also co-founded Structured Blogging initiative in 2005 with participation from over 50 leading technology companies.

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