During the period of 13-16 May 2007, Telerik attended the STC Annual Conference. Earlier this year, the documentation of one of the most popular Telerik navigation controls, RadTreeView, won the Distinguished Award in the STC International Online Communication Competition and Best of Show Award for the Boston STC chapter.
The 54th Technical Communication Summit was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center and hosted more than 110 sessions, pre-conference workshops, networking lunches and an exposition with more than 70 vendor booths.
In the wide variety of sessions, panels, and workshops, we found the following topics most valuable and appealing:
- Developing Successful E-learning Courses – The one-day workshop focused on several problematic areas in the design of E-learning courses such as storyboard writing, determining the look and feel of the course, creation of instructional screens and last but not least – encouraging user interaction and feedback.
- Creating Usable and Accessible Content – In this interactive session, we reviewed selected Web pages to expand repertoire of guidelines for successful technical documentation and Web writing.
- Paper Prototyping for Documentation and Help – This presentation covered a variety of usability testing methods, most of which can be used while the material is still in development. The main idea was to get feedback on how well your documents will work before you finalize them.
- Using Sample Programs to Document APIs and SDKs – The session discussed the advantages of online demonstration examples, such as Telerik’s Quick Start Framework and supplementary material explaining how the specific example was built.
Society for Technical Communication is an organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. Its 18,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrator and anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.