athloi's Journal: User advocacy and technical writing

My main concern in life, as a developer and a writer, is to make technology that people can actually use. To this end, I've created User Advocacy, a blog for technical communications and user interface design.

Now you might be saying, Why would you bother with this silliness when the real work occurs in development? That's a good question, and the best answer is that in my view, technical communications is part of development, as much as programming the interface is. The lesson we learn from Apple's success, and Windows' continuing GUI development, is that a good interface is necessary to get the rest of us online and using machines productively. Technical writers and communicators and user interface designers make developers look good by making the product more likely to be powerful in the hands of a user.

Part of this includes educating users about how to use technology, including the concepts behind it. There's too much ignorance all around. Look for more updates here, especially as Slashdot's notoriously tolerant moderation relaxes on some of my replies to threads of this nature.