My Services

As a Van­cou­ver tech­ni­cal writer and instruc­tion­al design­er with more than 20 years of expe­ri­ence, I’ve cre­at­ed dozens of deliverables—including user guides, online help, con­tent for mobile devices, sim­u­la­tions, inter­ac­tive ses­sions, and Fol­low Me walk throughs—that make it eas­i­er for users to use technology. 

Some of my strengths include:

• Breadth of expe­ri­ence. I have ample expe­ri­ence writ­ing help sys­tems, user guides, release notes, quick ref­er­ence cards, online videos, trou­bleshoot­ing con­tent for sup­port web sites, and instruc­tion­al design and mar­ket­ing con­tent for a num­ber of com­pa­nies includ­ing Adobe, ADP, BC Hydro, Boe­ing, Change Health­care, City of Van­cou­ver, Elec­tron­ic Arts, For­tis­BC, ICBC, Kal Tire, Kodak, SRK Con­sult­ing, and Teck Resources Limited.

• Proven project man­age­ment. I adept­ly jug­gle mul­ti­ple deliv­er­ables, I deliv­er when I say I will, and I always strive to deliv­er con­tent on or before a dead­line. At Boe­ing, I man­aged the cre­ation of a 700-top­ic help sys­tem, sev­en quick ref­er­ence cards, a get­ting start­ed guide, and a myr­i­ad of learn­ing mod­ules for a soft­ware appli­ca­tion designed to help Boe­ing man­age all of its domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al suppliers.

• Exper­tise with tech­nol­o­gy. Demon­strat­ed knowl­edge of Mad­Cap Flare, Mad­Cap Lin­go, mobile apps, Per­force, JavaScript, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets, Share­Point, Con­flu­ence, Visio, Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, web ana­lyt­ics, Word­Press, Dru­pal, Dar­win Infor­ma­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture (DITA), Oxy­gen XML Edi­tor, Adobe Robo­Help, EPUB files, HTML5, SAP, Microsoft Dynam­ics 365, blogs, wikis, Mark­down, sin­gle-sourc­ing, Snag­it, and writ­ing SDK doc­u­men­ta­tion. I have earned my Mad­Cap Advanced Devel­op­er certification.

Documentation for Mobile Devices

Most recent­ly, I’ve cre­at­ed EPUB and HTML5 files for clients. EPUB and HTML5 files change how tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors deliv­er mobile documentation.

I’ve blogged about for­mat­ting EPUB files and spoke about the sub­ject at the Writ­er­sUA con­fer­ence in Seat­tle and the Cana­da West Coast Chap­ter of the Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (STC). In 2013, I wrote an arti­cle for the STC’s Inter­com mag­a­zine too. Here is a sam­ple page:

I have also writ­ten blog posts about mobile apps and a white paper for Adobe on mobile app trends. The fol­low­ing images dis­play the first two pages from the white paper:

User Guides

I’ve writ­ten many users guides over the years, and earned an inter­na­tion­al award of excel­lence for one doc­u­ment that I wrote.

One of the doc­u­ments that I’m proud of is the Priner­gy Evo Under­stand­ing Lay­out User Guide. The guide address­es how to use a com­plex part of Priner­gy Evo soft­ware, which is designed to help com­mer­cial print­ers pre­pare and out­put their files to proofers and presses.

The guide was cre­at­ed after the Priner­gy Evo sup­port team real­ized that many of their users strug­gled with one aspect of the soft­ware. As part of the sup­port team, I worked with sub­ject mat­ter experts to hone the key mes­sages, liaised with a graph­ic design­er to cre­ate the illus­tra­tions, and then post­ed the fin­ished doc­u­ment to Kodak’s sup­port web site.

The Priner­gy Evo Under­stand­ing Lay­out User Guide was well received with­in the com­pa­ny and was embraced by local and inter­na­tion­al users. After the guide was uploaded, I con­firmed (using web ana­lyt­ics soft­ware) that the doc­u­ment was one of the most down­loaded PDFs after its release. In the months that fol­lowed, sup­port calls on the issue began to drop. Here is a sam­ple page from the document.

Microsoft Word Templates

I have designed Word tem­plates that include a title page, a table of con­tents, head­ers and foot­ers, con­tent con­trols, fields, doc­u­ment prop­er­ties that repeat, styles, and pages that accom­mo­date both land­scape and por­trait pages for SRK and Cap­stone Cop­per.

Online Help

I have cre­at­ed many online help projects for com­pa­nies. At For­tis­BC, I doc­u­ment­ed dozens of SAP pro­ce­dures for Call Cen­tre Staff. We wrote con­tent in Microsoft Word and then uploaded the con­tent to an inter­nal Share­Point 2010 web site. Here is a screen cap­ture of a pro­ce­dure that I wrote and illustrated.

Single Source Publishing

I have employed sin­gle source pub­lish­ing when cre­at­ing deliv­er­ables at Boe­ing, Kodak, and Teck Resources. Sin­gle source pub­lish­ing is most often under­stood as the cre­ation of one source doc­u­ment in an author­ing tool (for exam­ple, Mad­Cap Flare) and con­vert­ing that doc­u­ment into dif­fer­ent for­mats (such as online help or quick ref­er­ence cards) with min­i­mal effort.

Training Content

I have researched, writ­ten, and deliv­ered instruc­tion­al design con­tent, includ­ing train­ing plans, learn­ing guides, Adobe Cap­ti­vate, uPer­form files, Opus files, self-direct­ed e‑learning con­tent, and job aids.

XML Authoring

I am well versed in writ­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion in XML using DITA.

When I worked at Kodak in Burn­a­by, British Colum­bia, the com­pa­ny employed 25 writ­ers and instruc­tion­al design­ers, mak­ing con­tent re-use a pri­or­i­ty. We authored con­tent in XMet­aL. I have also used Oxy­gen XML Edi­tor for ICBC.

Web Authoring

I’ve main­tained many web sites—including cor­po­rate intranets and sup­port web sites. I also designed and main­tain this site. I’m adept at using HTML, web author­ing tools, wikis, and writ­ing blogs.

Localization Work

I worked with a third-par­ty trans­la­tion ven­dor to local­ize con­tent for French users for a well-estab­lished radi­ol­o­gy pro­gram, which man­ages, dis­plays, and stores med­ical images, video, and asso­ci­at­ed patient and med­ical infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion, I iden­ti­fied and imple­ment­ed work­flow improve­ments for the trans­la­tion process, includ­ing main­tain­ing a term base, cre­at­ing check­lists to stan­dard­ize the review of local­ized doc­u­ments, and iden­ti­fy­ing tasks that could be auto­mat­ed using macros.

Quick Reference Cards and Getting Started Documents

Quick ref­er­ence cards and get­ting start­ed guides pro­vide users with print-based, high­ly graph­i­cal doc­u­ments that typ­i­cal­ly intro­duce a new prod­uct. I’ve cre­at­ed many quick ref­er­ence cards and man­aged the trans­la­tion of the files into near­ly 10 languages.

Online Demonstrations

Online demon­stra­tions or videos are great at quick­ly con­vey­ing key mes­sages. At Kal Tire, I cre­at­ed step-by-step pro­ce­dures, sim­u­la­tions, inter­ac­tive ses­sions, and Fol­low Me walk throughs of key tasks in Microsoft Dynam­ics 365 using Epi­logue Opus.

Presentation and Delivery Skills

I have deliv­ered vir­tu­al and instruc­tor-led pre­sen­ta­tions as a writ­ing instruc­tor for Simon Fras­er Uni­ver­si­ty and Van­cou­ver Com­mu­ni­ty College.

I’d be hap­py to you show you some sam­ples of my port­fo­lio. Con­tact me today.