Finnotype

It is a telltale sign of failed user experience when you need to write "click" in technical documentation. When did you last read the Twitter user guide? Me neither. Using Twitter is pretty self-evident. Just look at the app and tweet. You don't need documentation. Self-explanatory tasks need no docs. They should be intuitive enough to complete by looking at the user interface and relying on past knowledge. Creating a folder? Moving a file? Cropping an image? Everyday stuff that should be obvious. A huge amount of effort goes into perfecting the user experience in consumer apps. Intuitive UX can lift an app above its competition just as disastrous UX can sink it. Great UX is infectious. It sets user expectations. Users start demanding that software at the workplace be just as simple. In that way, consumer software forces enterprise software to adapt. For  Magnolia 5 , we broke our necks to make Web content management simple. Instead of features ga...

Eleven years ago Tim Berners-Lee said that the next logical step for the World Wide Web was  semantic . The idea was that one day machines could read and understand Web pages. Content would be tagged in a meaningful way: a date would be tagged as a date and an address as an address. Relevance would replace ambiguity. Finding, sharing and combining information would become easier. Today the semantic Web remains a pipe dream. Here is quick proof: When in Basel, Switzerland, go to Google News . Look at the top stories. See a bunch of stories about bank liquidity requirements? Minimum capital levels for financial institutions? How are these stories relevant to you being in Basel? They are not. Google is doing simple string matching. It detects your geographical location to Basel. It then finds news stories that say "Basel". It doesn't know that the Basel III agreement that regulates bank capital adequacy just happens to be named after the city ...

Have you seen the recent boom in infographics? Everybody and their mom is doing them. Infographics are used to illustrate  complex data , timelines , trends ,  cheat sheets  and much more . They make complex processes easier to understand and visualize trends that you can't see with the naked eye. Can infographics be used in technical documentation? At Magnolia we drew a  roadmap  for migrating from Magnolia CMS 4.4 to 4.5. It is a winding road that involves many tasks. Each milestone is explained on a wiki page in detail. Here are the design guidelines I used in case you want to create an infographic of your own. Use a diagram tool  such as Visio or OmniGraffle. You will be using lots of boxes and connectors and resizing and scaling the elements. Working with vector shapes is easier and results in a sharp image. Max width 1000 px . Keep the width under 1000 pixels. This is a size that everyone can see without scrolling horizontally. ...

Translating website content just got easier. Magnolia CMS now supports XLIFF as a content export format. I sat down with Language Technologist Twan Sevriens  to test the feature and learn how it makes a translation workflow easier. Translating a multilanguage website When you translate a website into multiple languages, you typically have two options: Translate the content within the CMS. Export the content in some file format, translate it outside the system, and import the results back. Although the first option sounds promising it has the drawback that most CMS systems are not built to optimize the translation workflow. Translators prefer to use CAT (computer-aided translation) tools that support and facilitate the translation process. CAT tools give direct access to helper functions and present the translator with just the text they need to translate, hiding details such as formatting. Looking for speed and consistency ...

– Austrasse, that's in my neighborhood! – Wettstein, I know where that is! – The river is almost complete. We set up a thousand-piece  Basel city map puzzle at one of the desks at Magnolia. (Yes, we sometimes work too.) The puzzle is made by Helvetiq, the company that makes the trivia quiz game of the same name. It turns out that a puzzle is a great way to learn about your co-workers. This is useful if you have lots of new staff like at Magnolia . People walk by the desk and solve a piece here, another there, explaining where they live and how they know the city. I can't imagine a better ice breaker.

Deleted mail was mysteriously disappearing from my email account. I could not find anything older than one week. The culprit turned out to be iPhone. I use it to read the same account. A well-hidden setting removed deleted messages. To check your iPhone: Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars . Select the account from which deleted messages are disappearing. Go to Account Info > Advanced . Under Deleted Messages , change Remove to Never . Go back to Advanced . Go back to Account Info . Click Done . This is important to save the setting! My removal interval was set to After one week . Gotcha!

Update! Picnik is closing on April 19, 2012 .  This is sad news. I really liked working with the product. Please sign the  Don't Close Picnik petition ! A subset of Picnik features is available in the Google+ Creative Kit but, crucially, the Photo Bucket is not. This means that the custom circles and arrows we use to annotate images are gone. At Magnolia, we recently started using Picnik  to annotate screenshots. We wanted a casual but obvious way to draw the reader's attention to an image detail. In this post I explain why we chose Picnik and how it is working so far. Picnik is a photo editor that runs in the browser. You may have seen it as the embedded photo editor in Picasa Web Albums. The requirements that drove us to a Web-based tool were: No OS lock-in . We have technical writers working on Windows 7, Vista and Mac OSX. It is difficult to find a screenshot tool that works on all those platforms. Skitch  is awesome on the Mac but a Wi...