This weekend I was a guest teacher for a joint venture of the Chicago chapter of STC and Northern Illinois University, “Technical Communication in a Digital Age“: I was talking about usability and content testing. I gave an overview of usability, user experience, and interaction design. Then we wrote testing scenarios for the STC Usability [...]
I met Brad Nunnally when we both presented at the STC annual conference in Sacramento in May. He lives in St. Louis, and my family is from St. Louis. Since I’ll be in town this summer to see old family farms and graveyards, Brad set up a lunch meetup at Shlafly Tap Room. He’s nice, [...]
During our workshop about grassroots content testing at the STC Summit in Sacramento, the participants listed difficulties and barriers to testing enterprise content—particularly when we haven’t been asked to do so! This series of posts is intended to let us generate some solutions to those difficulties. I’ve decided to straight-up post the Post-its and let [...]
To be clear: I mean test subjects! I think it’s much nicer to be called a tester than a test subject, but it can be a bit confusing. During our workshop about grassroots content testing at the STC Summit in Sacramento, the participants listed difficulties and barriers to testing enterprise content—particularly when we haven’t been [...]
During our workshop about grassroots content testing at the STC Summit in Sacramento, the participants listed difficulties and barriers to testing enterprise content—particularly when we haven’t been asked to do so! This series of posts is intended to let us generate some solutions to those difficulties. I’ve decided to straight-up post the Post-its and let [...]
During our workshop about grassroots content testing at the STC Summit in Sacramento, the participants listed difficulties and barriers to testing enterprise content—particularly when we haven’t been asked to do so! This series of posts is intended to let us generate some solutions to those difficulties. Hmm, I’ve delayed a bit posting these, because I [...]
I gave this workshop for the third time at the STC Annual Summit in Sacramento, CA. The post-session discussion is here. Grassroots doctesting sacramento_v3
When I was deciding on a format for my workshop, Grassroots Documentation Testing, I thought of Tom Johnson’s collaborative posts on his blog, IdRatherBeWriting.com. In collaborative posts, Tom poses a question to his readers (who include many seasoned and successful technical communicators), and they respond with advice in the comments. Here’s a link to an [...]
During the Rochester run of my workshop on testing documentation, I gave the participants documents they weren’t familiar with and asked them to write testing scenarios to test the effectiveness of the doc. One of the challenges of doc testing, even when one is familiar with the document, is aligning the tests with the goals [...]
During the Rochester run of my workshop, Grassroots Documentation Testing, we used tested sample content. Once piece we used was a pamphlet called Tricks & Tips for Biking to Work by Dave Glowacz. The pamphlet is an excerpt from his book, Urban Bikers’ Tricks & Tips. The piece was unfamiliar to the workshop attendees, and [...]
Hi, I’m Kristi Leach.
I’m a writer, content strategist, and designer in Chicago.
I have working knowledge and experience in the following: technical writing, website planning, user experience, and design thinking.
My core skill is all things content. That means I bring a content-centric view to UX roles, and it means I know how to collaborate with folks in all those fields on content projects.
Current obsession: how design and UX roles vary across organizations. Here, take my survey.
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