Joe Welinske: Crafted Communication – Episode 26

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Joe Welinske creates content strategies and other crafted communication as a UX practitioner, teacher, and event organizer.

Joe is super-thoughtful about the role of content in helping people use technology. We had a great conversation about his journey from old-school technical communicator to leading-edge UX practitioner.

We talked about:

• • Joe’s journey from industrial engineering to technical communication
  • how he and others were doing “content strategy” long before the phrase was coined
  • the evolution of the University of Washington’s iSchool from a library-science program to one focused on digital products and services
  • evidence-driven design
  • how the field of “user assistance” (wizards, tutorials, interactive components within software, etc.) emerged from technical communication
  • the importance of continuing to be an active content practitioner even as you transition into a more strategic role
  • the importance of constant learning, and expanding your focus beyond your specific field of practice
  • the continuing relevance of user assistance in modern user experience development environments
  • his interest in, and advocacy of, accessibility –
  • the value in not only meeting basic guidelines, but also trying to be innovative about how to develop information so that all of us are able to consume it
  • recognizing and empathizing with folks who face accessibility challenges
  • designing, both technically and semantically, navigation and content for accessibility
  • promoting accessibility techniques as a new skill set to build into content strategy roles

Bio

Joe Welinske specializes in helping improve digital products and services through crafted communication. The best user experience features a quality collection of words and images in the user interface. The UX of a robust product is also enhanced through a comprehensive approach to accessibility, content strategy and user assistance. For close to thirty years, Joe has been providing education, training, contracting, and consulting services.

One of Joe’s most satisfying current activities is as program manager for Seattle’s annual conference for user experience professionals called ConveyUX conference. This event – produced by Blink UX – attracts UX professionals from around the world. Other events Joe produces include conferences for technical communication and software user assistance.

Joe is regularly involved as an instructor at the University of Washington in several departments, including the iSchool. He also teaches classes for UC Silicon Valley Extension and Bellevue College.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone, welcome to episode number 26 of the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I’m really happy, today, to have with us, Joe Welisnke. Joe is a real strong figure here in the local Seattle UX community, and he’s been a content strategist before we were using the term content strategist. He evolved out of the technical communication world in the 80s and 90s, and then into the UX world, and along the way has accomplished a lot and done a lot of teaching and other things, so we have a lot to talk about today.

Larry:
So, I want to jump right into it. First of all, welcome, Joe. Do you have anything more you’d like to say about your background for the folks?

Joe:
Well, yeah. Thanks, Larry, it’s great to be doing this with you. I’ve enjoyed your previous episodes and guest for this, I hope I can be up to that level of it. But yeah, working with content is something that I’ve done for my whole career, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Starting back in … just deciding what to do for college, liking writing, but also being a real tech geek.

Joe:
And so, is it English, engineering? Probably get a job with engineering, so I went with that. Yeah, so I started with industrial engineering at the University of Illinois, and my first job out of college was they needed somebody to be putting together all of the technical information associated with their product.

Larry:
Nice. Well see, you have the classic background, because my dad was an engineer, my mom was journalist, and so they had a lot of the hybrid kind of people like that in this world. I think it’s safe to say that you’ve had kind of a front row seat on the evolution of the field of technical communication into the UX world. And all along the way, you’ve been doing content strategy, but when did you start calling it content strategy?

Joe:
That’s something that I think about and talk about with people all the time. I think the way that we use that label is something that is relatively, lately, that we’ve been using that turn, but, as you mentioned in kind of my introduction, I think of it as going back quite a long way in terms of the actual things that we do as part of content development, and then with a specialized look at what it means to provide strategy for that.

Joe:
I realized that, what was the robust field of technical communication goes back to the 40s and 50s when we had this huge burst of technology and needed to be able to communicate what was going on within various teams. My classes that I teach, I always like to bring up that famous novelists like, Thomas Pynchon, and the science fiction novelist, Ben Bova, started as technical writers doing mainly in the aeronautical industry, the defense industry, and then when into the creative side of things.

Joe:
So, we have a long standing background. And things like, the importance of writing and visual design, audience analysis, task analysis, that kind of stuff’s been around forever. Task analysis being one of those things that I really, I’m glad that, that was part of my engineering background, because we had a strong grounding in that, fortunately.

Joe:
Things like, I teach in the University of Washington’s iSchool, which essentially was library science for about 90 years. And then, around the year 2000, they rebranded it to recognize what’s going on with digital products and services. And so, I do appreciate, kind of, the arc of the evolution of content strategy.

Larry:
And you just kind of highlighted a couple things that really interest me about the field. I think it’s kind of a gathering spot for people from all kinds of different backgrounds, who now share this common label. Like, you come out of the technical communication world, a lot of your students might have been librarians 20 years ago. A lot of people come from journalism, from marketing, from IT and from technology fields.

Larry:
Your students at the UW and the iSchool, do most of them start from … how much are they about information? How much are they about technology? How much are they about writing? There’s sort of like this swath of interests. Can we stereotype them, or do they come from all over the map?

Joe:
Yeah, it’s really all over, and even if you’re just talking about my classes, there’s different ones that have different constituencies, so there’s undergraduate tech writing classes where it’s mainly people in engineering needing to have a credit, a writing credit, and that happens to apply what their doing. And then, there are some people that are primarily interested in going into interaction design, the user experience profession more broadly, and so that’s a different sensibility.

Joe:
So, there are a lot of different places that our people are coming from and wanting to go to. In terms of the classes that I teach that are related to communication, there definitely tends to be the people that are coming from journalism, creative writing background, that want to get into technology area, and then there are people that are already in the technology area that want to explore being able to use their communication skills. And so, there definitely is this interesting nexus there, and I think everybody can be successful, it’s just a matter of recognizing that if you want to get involved in digital products and services, you have to enjoy technology. And if you’re already a technologist, that there’s a lot to learn about how to effectively communicate.

Larry:
Right. It’s interesting that those are kind of the two main we talked about at the very start. Those are the two main ways that people come in, like from technology or writing. I’m wondering how the twain have met. Is there a new thing that’s emerging from this little melting pot? You’re right there on the front lines watching this next generation of people, is there a new sort of articulation of this, or new way that people think about it?

Joe:
Well, yeah, there is, and I think as you see how content development has merged in with user experience, that there are new skillsets and sensibilities that are associated with that. Where, for example, in the iSchool, people are definitely coming into that recognizing that important aspects are interactivity, creativity. One of my main clients that I work with, Blink UX, one of their important taglines is evidence driven design. Being user advocates, those are all extremely progressive aspects of designing digital products and services today, that I don’t think traditional technical communication embrace, necessarily, is as quickly as it could have or should have.

Larry:
That’s interesting, that’s one of those kind of connecting trends, I think, that’s pulling things together in the middle of that evidence baseness of things. I come out of, like, traditional publishing, and even in the … I think of my, I just look back with horror at my publishing days and my early dot com days, because we were all just know-it-alls. Making stuff up and doing it the way that we’ve always done it, and having some decent business results and stuff, but things are, to my mind, things are so much better now, that things evidence based.

Larry:
For example, user research in the UX field, having that as a core component of it. I want to kind of stitch this into your background a little bit, because you come out of the field that is widely known in the computer world as user assistance, like writing the manuals, providing the tutorials, and all that stuff to help people use products.

Larry:
How was that kind of field morphed into and integrated with the UX and content strategy worlds? I guess, both for you personally and as a field.

Joe:
Yeah, I had already been doing technical communication for a while. Well, I’m old, but in the early 90s as prominent companies like, Microsoft, were doing a lot of documentation related their software products, that the term user assistance started to come out of organizations like that, which was a recognition of the idea that what they needed to provide had to be more comprehensive, more multidisciplinary approach to what they were providing and that traditional printed manuals weren’t necessarily going to be the future, but that it was even more than writing, that it was thinking about wizards, tutorials, interactive components within the software itself, so that you weren’t going to external documentation, the idea of starting to bring in video content as that became possible through technology.

Joe:
And so, user assistance was essentially taking it beyond saying that I’m writing manuals, recognizing that there are a lot of different parts to that. I’ve always tried to bring that into my teaching for technical communicators, and so in our syllabus, I have topics on, that I’m always evolving on, video script writing, storytelling, usability testing, things which definitely wouldn’t of been part of a traditional tech com curriculum 25 years ago.

Larry:
Right. All of a sudden, you’re reminding me of one of the things that just kind of drives me nuts a little bit about of field is, just the word content. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, too generic, too … it’s just, I don’t know, but I think a lot of people, early on, you just thought of content as words or some of the words that you dumped into a thing.

Larry:
You just rattled off a long list of different kinds of content that have helped people use software for a long time, and a lot of what you talked, I think virtually everything you talked about, has now been kind of merged into what we think of as the UX field.

Joe:
It’s something that’s close to my heart, is this issue of what it means for content. But just on a side thing, I’ve always felt like good software documentation has always … hasn’t quite gotten it, it’s due because, probably, if you look at the last 25 years, and you were able to aggregate all of the software documentation that’s ever been done, I would, without any data on it, I would say 95% of that has been written by people that have no interest in doing it and is just something that needed to get done.

Joe:
And the people that do care about it will put together effective information, it’s not always perfect, but there’s that part of it. And then, just the issue of what it means, what that word content means, I think that’s something I reflect on a lot, as well, because I still think that a granular attention to words, and phrases and images is really that core connection with people in the moment and subconsciously … you know, a lot of wire frames. It’s pretty common to see a placeholder that says content goes here, which doesn’t have the underlying support or analysis of what really is going to go there. Who’s the person that’s going to be putting that content in there?

Larry:
That comes up over and over again, and I’m beginning to articulate in my head, after what, this is the 26th … all of what you were saying reminded me of a … one of the ways you describe your consulting practice is that you offer crafted communication.

Larry:
I want you to talk a little bit, because I think what you were just talking about kind of gets it there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Joe:
Sure. I’ve always felt that, although probably more projects than not that I work on now, I’m working at the levels of planning and strategy for comprehensive solutions, but I feel like I’m still an active practitioner, and it’s important to me to, in a project, to get into what the … what actually is happening at that granular level to get into the words, phrases and images to have a connection with the people in an organization, that are the ones that will actually be developing that “content.”

Joe:
And, in projects, I don’t feel like I can be effective at strategy if I don’t put in at least some time myself into the position of those content writers, and crank some of that out. I’m always a little bit, I always wonder a little bit about strategists that actually never kind of get into the trenches and make sure that their skills are still going in that area.

Joe:
It’s not that … definitely the broader strategy area is different from the development from the content. I guess the bottom line is just that you always have a connection with what’s going, actually going out to be consumed by your readers and viewers.

Larry:
That makes perfect sense to me, what you just said. I think so many, I don’t know, I’ve even thought about this myself in my practice, where that dividing line between strategy and implementation, that you can’t really draw that line. Like you were just saying, you’ve got to be jumping over that line, seeing how it’s actually done so that you can craft a strategy that’s informed by actual practice and experience.

Joe:
Yeah, I think it’s at least important to stay a part of that. As you’re developing strategies that may include publishing processes and technologies, to also understand what’s possible for the staff that are in the organization that you’re working with to make sure that, that really matches how they’re going to be able to work on a day-to-day basis.

Larry:
That kind of gets into one of the big overriding and overarching trends, and just in technology and life, in general, is just the relentless pace and acceleration of change.

Larry:
You’re in a good position to keep on top of things, you run the ConveyUX Conference every year, you teach regularly, you’re practicing. How do you keep on top of all that, and like you were just saying, for example, like keeping on top, both of like, your internal staff capabilities and what they can do and know, and then kind of all the technology possibilities that are out there?

Joe:
Well I mean, for me, I think I make it happen because I’m interested in technology, I like to apply time to keeping up with things. Going to conferences that I’m not necessarily speaking at, like this last week, watching the keynotes from the Windows Build Conference, Google I/O, what Apple’s doing, what comes out of the various technology organizations helps me, I think, keep relevant, but I mean, that’s kind of separate from content strategy, which is just, generally I’m always telling my students that it’s to their benefit to be open and always learning, and being ready to work with new ideas.

Joe:
I mean, that even comes in to the area of mobile devices, where obviously that’s becoming a ubiquitous part of our lives, but a lot of traditional technical communication still thinks about what they’re presenting in the, as being directly relevant to the large screen monitor that’s on their corporate desk. And so, I’m always trying to remind people that they have to shrink down that screen real estate and find out whether what they’ve been writing is still consumable to even use technologies like we have built into Google Chrome, where you can resize the browser window so that you can immediately see what your treatise looks like on an iPhone.

Joe:
And it’s dramatically different. I wrote a book, 2010, and then a second one, 2014, Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps, and already the tech part of that book is completely out of date, but I wanted to explore the idea of what it means to write for small. And that brought up a lot of interesting design and writing challenges.

Larry:
Yeah, and I think in someways, like, I think somebody like, Sarah Wachter-Boettcher, might argue that that’s just like the first shot across the bow, that mobile responsiveness, that’s the first example. And then, you have voice interfaces coming and chat bots, and you know, that kind of use of content. And somebody’s going to have to create that content, and I assume the strategist will have to strategize about it.

Larry:
There’s so much need for content to be portable, to be able to go … well, content everywhere is, I think that’s the title of one of Sarah Wachter-Boettcher books. So, you’re sort of on top of teaching trends, as well. How quickly does the curriculum at place, like the iSchool, catch up to trends like mobile responsiveness and that kind of stuff?

Joe:
Well, I guess there’s two parts to that. One is that, large scale institutions, educational institutions, actually move really slowly in terms of rolling out new courses, but they’re always working on it, because that’s their mission, as well. And so, it doesn’t tend to react immediately, but hopefully instructors with progressive attitude are always bringing in the latest information into what they’re working on.

Joe:
So, there’s probably two sides to that part of it, but yeah. One of the talks that I do for some technical communication groups is how user assistance can fit well within modern user experience development environments, and a big part of that is understanding what’s skills you have that are completely relevant, but where you need to acquire new skills.

Joe:
I show some examples of a course listing from contemporary times with one from even 10, 12 years ago, and it’s dramatically different. So, the universities, the good ones, do evolve, and so the iSchool is a good example of one that is definitely right up there with the latest trends.

Larry:
So much of the education now, at least like, and again this is the case at the iSchool, as well, is that so much of it is like, actual hands on project work, and they’re probably going out and downloading the latest apps, and software, and gadgets and adopting practices that they read about, right?

Joe:
Yeah, that’s definitely the case. There’s always new tools popping up and fortunately a lot of software vendors are good about helping to provide us with extended free licenses for some of the software for our students to be able to keep that relevant, because the university itself doesn’t always have the ability to buy the latest tech.

Larry:
Right. Yeah, I can only imagine. How many students are there at the iSchool? Is that a big program?

Joe:
Well, it continues to grow, and so for example, in any given quarter, one of the foundation courses, which is design thinking, has at least four or five sections of 25 to 30 students. And so, the annual cohorts are pretty substantive.

Larry:
Hey, I just noticed, we’re coming up on almost 25 minutes. One thing I definitely want to talk to you about is accessibility, that’s another, that’s an interest of yours, and curious how your interest in accessibility relates to your role as a content strategist and how those interests overlap.

Joe:
My first exposure to accessibility was actually when I was a member, my company was a member of the World Wide Web Consortium back in 1998, and I wanted to get involved with some of the working groups, which essentially are where things like HTML, XML, cascading style sheets originally came from. And what they were just rolling out at the time was the web accessibility initiative, which came with authoring guidelines, so I got involved with that working group. That whole program headed up by Judy Brewer at MIT.

Joe:
So, that was my first introduction with it, and since then, I’ve tried to stay close to that and apply best practices as I can with the various projected I’ve been involved in. It’s still a struggle, I think, to be able to get effective resources from most organizations to make sure that their digital projects and services are available to people with various challenges. Right now I’m one of the co-organizers of the local Seattle Accessibility and Inclusive Design meetup group, and we have meetings every month, and just making sure that we’re always trying to evangelize the idea about making sure that your content works with screen readers, attention to captioning, transcripts. An area that gets very little attention is being able to work with people with cognitive challenges.

Joe:
And there’s just so much that we can do. And so, I guess one of my biggest things in terms of wanting to evangelize accessibility is that, to take it out of being a bottleneck where there’s an accessibility person that audits, reviews and adjusts content for it to be accessibility, and rather that everybody within content strategy user experience technical communication acquires the basic skills to be able to support their own work and make sure that they’re not only meeting basic guidelines, but also trying to be innovative about how to develop their information so that all of us are able to consume that information.

Larry:
Also, to not just comply, but to advance accessibility, like, really make it. One thing about that, you gave some good ideas there and the idea of like, your evangelism work in that area, getting more people on board with the idea. I’m wondering, also though, if there’s any … you know, of the benefits of being strategic like a content strategist, is that you can bake stuff into a process earlier on. Have you found any, like … I’m just trying to think, like, easy wins or things you can do early in a content strategy process to improve accessibility?

Joe:
Well, one of the things that we always talked about is, first of all, to make these challenges visible. And so, the first thing that you can do is make sure that there is a recognition and empathy for what it means to people with various challenges to be able to have this built in. For someone working with a screen reader who’s blind, if the underlying content code base is not well formed, that content, essentially, becomes invisible.

Joe:
If the architecture, the navigation of that content, is not put together both technically and semantically in a good way, again, that information becomes either invisible or extremely difficult to be able to process. And so, that’s definitely the first place, and I think one of the cool things about today’s content strategy is that it does look to the sea level of organizations to set the tone for what it means to do content strategy, and that plays well with accessibility because setting that tone at that C-level, that ends up allowing that to pour through into all the different departments that make up our products and services.

Larry:
Well, that’s great. So, getting by at that high up, that makes perfect sense, better than just some lower level kind of implementation and enforcement thing, to actually have a culture that supports accessibility.

Joe:
And then also, promoting the idea that this is an area that’s a new skillset, same as any other skills we may add to our toolkit, and that it’s important for people to take the time and read a book, look at a website, go through some tutorials. There’s a wealth of information about accessibility. There’s just a huge amount in our world’s knowledge base, and so, one of the main things is for each of us to embrace that and bring it in to our own work lives.

Larry:
Nice. Okay well, that’s about all the time we’ve got today, Joe. I really want to thank you for taking the time to come on and talk with us today.

Larry:
I know you go to a lot of events and organize a lot of events, what’s the next thing coming up here in Seattle?

Joe:
Well, so, ConveyUX has been Seattle’s main UX conference for, well the past six years, and so we’ll be continuing to do that event, and we’re also going to be … and that event is, I’m the program manager for that, that’s produced by Blink UX, and that’s going to be expanding to other parts of the country, as well, with some specially themed content. And then, I’m always still involved with user assistance and tech com. I’m going to be putting on an event in Raleigh, North Carolina, in association with the Department of English at North Carolina State, so still staying connected to kind of my love of technical writing, as well.

Larry:
I love that. The whole thing has looped back, we’re right back to your English and engineering coming together.

Joe:
I’m never going to let that go, I just enjoy it too much.

Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks, so much, Joe. Have a good one.

Joe:
All right. Thanks a lot, Larry.