Harry Miller's Visual Communication Blog

Podcast: Office Casual and the success of directness

Office Casual is one of the most successful video series created by Microsoft content producers. Doug Thomas, the person behind it, talks about how it got its direct, no-frills look (and why the show keeps that look).

Listen to the episode
Duration: 15:59
Size: 10.9 MB

Watch episodes of Office Casual at the Inside Office Online blog.

For articles about increasing your Office skills, free downloads, and more information, visit Office Online at http://office.microsoft.com/.

TC4D: Guiding viewers through complex information

Complex information is usually easier to understand when it’s presented in a graphic format, such as a process flowchart or workflow diagram. But even those can be confusing at first glance, and look more complicated than they actually are. Well, here’s a way to make it easier for your audience to digest that kind of complexity – lead them through it with some animation eye-candy! Eric Schmidt, a writer for PowerPoint, shows how he takes Visio diagrams and animates the path through them in PowerPoint, which helps viewers focus on the important and most relevant information.

For information about PowerPoint and Visio, see http://office.microsoft.com. 

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Podcast: Eye candy and aesthetics make things work better

Research has indicated that attractive things are easier to use and work better than purely functional equivalents.

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Duration: 14:48
Size: 10.4 MB

We know it’s more fun to use tools and software and kitchen appliances that are not only well designed for use, but that are pretty too. In this episode, we discuss an article by Stephen P. Anderson, “In Defense of Eye Candy,” about how aesthetics affects usability, success, and basic enjoyment while doing tasks.

“In Defense of Eye Candy” by Stephen P. Anderson
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy

For more articles, free downloads, and more information, visit Office Online at http://office.microsoft.com/.

TC4D: Preparing for a media-centered future

Well, the title of the presentation I saw was "Preparing for a Media-Centered Future", but the interesting content was mostly about preparing your media (video in particular) for effective distribution. I talked with one of the presenters, Travis Petershagen, about how he does this as part of Microsoft Studios.

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TC4D: Technical Communication in the 4th Dimension

TC4D is my video blog about technical communication in the fourth dimension. In episode 1, I talk about the fourth dimension and ways to use it.

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Podcast: Leading visual content teams

Where does Jonathan want to take content for the visual tools PowerPoint, Office Graphics, and Visio in the future?

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Duration: 14:23
Size: 9.88 MB

Harry and Jonathan talk about trends in Web video, what Office is doing, and why it's important to teach soft skills and not just features.

For more articles, free downloads, and more information, visit Office Online at http://office.microsoft.com/.

Visio: Drawing on Experience with Scott Helmers

Learn more about using Visio to create diagrams and illustrations from people who use it every day.

Scott Helmers interview

Scott Helmers went from doing primarily consulting work to creating software that extends Visio in specific directions. He talks about how visual "maps" of processes can make it easier and faster to understand what's happening in the process.

For information about Visio, visit the Visio home page on Office Online.

Download the video in portable device and WMV formats - click the picture, and on the TechNet Edge site, look under the video player. Where it says "Formats" there's a drop-down list of downloadable versions for different players.

Visio: Drawing on Experience with Chris Roth

Learn more about using Visio to create diagrams and illustrations from people who use it every day.

Chris Roth interview

Chris Roth, also known as Visio Guy, gives some insight into the types of solutions he creates using Visio.

Sometimes these solutions bring in data and generate a diagram, sometimes they start with a diagram and generate a report, and sometimes the diagram is the solution.

For information about Visio, visit the Visio home page on Office Online.

Download the video in portable device and WMV formats - click the picture, and on the TechNet Edge site, look under the video player. Where it says "Formats" there's a drop-down list of downloadable versions for different players.

Visio: Drawing on Experience with Senaj Lelic

Learn more about using Visio to create diagrams and illustrations from people who use it every day.

Senaj Lelic interview

Senaj Lelic, consultant and trainer, talks about why he uses Visio when there are other drawing and diagramming tools available. He also addresses the question of why people sometimes think Visio is going to be complex and difficult to use.

Senaj uses Visio to create visual analysis tools that show important data in clear ways, such as changing icons and colors to show status and values.

For information about Visio, visit the Visio home page on Office Online.

Download the video in portable device and WMV formats - click the picture, and on the TechNet Edge site, look under the video player. Where it says "Formats" there's a drop-down list of downloadable versions for different players.

Podcast: Visual literacy and illiteracy

Harry, Jonathan, Joy, and Eric talk about what visual literacy might mean and whether there is such a thing as visual illiteracy.

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Duration: 16:09
Size: 11.1 MB

When you use an image to communicate, do you know whether the viewer will understand the image the way you meant it? Visual literacy depends on the sender and the receiver having a common understanding of how an image is used and what it means. Or, they can create a shared understanding in certain contexts.

In the article we use as the beginning of our conversation, Robert Lane and Andre Vlcek state: "Over the years, we’ve observed at least 20 different ways people take advantage of pictures in presentation, what are called picture roles. These roles are marvelous. They can jumpstart creativity and at the same time provide templates for picture use. In this article, we’ll explore eight roles in particular..."

Do these picture roles represent a visual vocabulary or syntax?

Speaking Visually: Eight Roles Pictures Play in Presentation

For more articles, free downloads, and more information, visit Office Online at http://office.microsoft.com/.

Visio: Drawing on Experience with David Edson

Learn more about using Visio to create diagrams and illustrations from people who use it every day.

David Edson interview

David Edson, a consultant who specializes in Visio and who used to work on the Visio team, explains the behavior of shapes. Shapes behave the way the represented object does in the real world. But you can add the behaviors that you need to shapes by using the ShapeSheet. The ShapeSheet is kind of like Excel; you put values and formulas in fields to get the functionality you want.

Visual representations as reports can use familiar images to convey information in the language and syntax of a business (financial, medical, and so on), instead of having information in spreadsheets and tables.

For information about Visio, visit the Visio home page on Office Online.

Download the video in portable device and WMV formats - click the picture, and on the TechNet Edge site, look under the video player. Where it says "Formats" there's a drop-down list of downloadable versions for different players.

Visio: Drawing on Experience with David Parker

Learn more about using Visio to create diagrams and illustrations from people who use it every day.

Interview with David Parker (on TechNet Edge site) 

David Parker, an independent IT consultant, explains why he uses Microsoft Office Visio to diagram networks, floor plans, and other information, and how he gets the most out of it. David uses diagrams linked to data to make it easier to see what the data means than if the data was in numbers or charts.

For information about Visio, visit the Visio home page on Office Online.

Download the video in portable device and WMV formats - click the picture, and on the TechNet Edge site, look under the video player. Where it says "Formats" there's a drop-down list of downloadable versions for different players.

Podcast: Montage and visual juxtaposition

Harry, Jonathan, Joy, and Eric talk about theories of montage and relating images through sequence.

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Duration: 20:03
Size: 13.7 MB

When you juxtapose or sequence images, meaning can be created, changed, or enhanced beyond that of each image alone. Show one image, then show another, and people see the second image differently than they would if they had seen it first. If you then show the first image again it takes on overtones of the second image. The brain seems to be wired to look for meaningful patterns.

Even juxtaposing colors can create meaning. For example, look at these two color paintings by artists that Jonathan mentions in the podcast. Why yellow, or why any of the colors?
Rothko: http://www.colourlovers.com/uploads/2008/01/rothko_painting.jpg
Mondrian: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/mondrian/mondrian_composition_a.jpg

When you give presentations, you're creating a sequence of images to support what you're saying. Is the sequence adding to the meaning, doing nothing, or interfering with the meaning?

Here's the Wikipedia article we talk about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory

For articles, free downloads, and more information, visit Office Online at http://office.microsoft.com/.

Multimedia Technical Communication

I've been creating a lot of multimedia content since I finished the bulk of editing for my core, in-product documentation projects: VSTO in Visual Studio 2008, VSTA 2.0, and the recently released service pack. This part is fun because we know more about what people want -- while the product is being developed, we do research to find out what customers want and how they will use it, but for the resulting implementation it's often somewhat speculative about what documentation people will need. After it ships, though, we get to find out for sure what people need by following customer questions in forums, comments on the topics on MSDN, and customer feedback bugs.

One of the things I've been doing is reading through the VSTO forum, looking for customer questions that I think a lot of people might have. To raise the visibility of the question and answer, I make a video about it and post it on the VSTO team blog. Have a look -- they're part screencast, part fantasy/noir/fiction. And they're usually less than 5 minutes long.

At the Office Developer Conference last February we talked with a lot of customers who wanted audio-only content to listen to on their commute, so we created three series of audio overviews that introduce Office development in Visual Studio: the Overview Series, the Components Series, and the Developer Series. Each series contains about 10 episodes that are about 5 minutes long.

I've also been contributing to the Video How To series on MSDN that's linked to the Visual Studio documentation. The idea behind these is that the video demonstrates a specific topic in the documentation. You can read the steps in the topic and follow along, or you can click the link to go to MSDN and watch the procedure in a video. Or, if you find the video first by using a search engine, you can follow a link from the video page to the topic to find the steps written out, copy the code, and read related information.

If you know of some mutimedia technical communication that you think is really effective, leave a comment and let me know about it!

Prioritizing for the Reader

Download the episode
Duration 3:11
Size 2.5 MB

Sometimes there are a lot of little notes that can be written about a feature, and sometimes features do several different things. Is it always best in an overview topic to document it all comprehensively?