A short work week. June 30th – July 4th

This week I only worked on Monday and Tuesday. Thursday and Friday were Holiday days for the Fourth of July for the whole office and I took Wednesday off to spend time with my cousin and Aunt who were in town to visit for a few days. On Monday and Tuesday I spent most of my time working on the CAST tutorial. I ended up learning a lot about the product and the countless amounts of functions at the user’s disposal. Since the tutorial is so large, I only was only able to complete a small fraction of the entire thing.

On Tuesday the TDOC group held a meeting to help organize my next project. Since members of the group are located all across the United States and Canada, the majority of our meetings include conference calls and an application sharing program. My next project was quality checking the product’s context sensitive help. Debbie, from St. Louis, had recently spent some time checking a small section of the context sensitive help and provided me with an example spreadsheet to use.

Currently I have attended a total of three meetings including the one mentioned above. The weekly meetings are usually about the general content improvement of the NX Online Help. Generally, a member of the team will share a project they are currently working on (usually a specific topic of the Online Help) and show the rest of the team how they have improved and ask for feedback and advice. The conference calls are something I’m still getting used to and up until now I haven’t contributed much because I am relatively unfamiliar with the product. A main topic of conversation in one of the meetings was article naming conventions and the team’s attempts to be consistent in this area. Since the Online help is so huge (more than a gig of text and simple graphics), the biggest problem the team seems to have is keeping everything that they do consistent. With such a large undertaking and ten or so employees working separately on it, it is difficult to keep things uniform and consistent. Another main topic that has come up in two of the meetings is the use of animated GIF graphics. Some of the team members, although they are trained as writers, are very good at creating animations in order to minimize massive amounts of text; however, users don’t like it when there are multiple animations on one screen distracting them from reading.