Jen deHaan Sr Technical Writer Adobe Systems Incorporated 601 Townsend St, MB#269 San Francisco, CA 94103 USA 415.832.7443 jdehaan@adobe.com I am a Sr. Technical Writer at Adobe, working with the Flash team to create documentation and instructional media for our software releases. The following outline describes my background in software and education, and the current challenges our team faces with helping our customers learn how to use Flash and write ActionScript. I have a BFA in developmental art (art education) from the University of Calgary, where I focused on both learning how to teach art to a variety of individuals, such as children and challenged students. After university, I attended Vancouver Film School and graduated with top honors in New Media. The course focused on using software to create web, video, audio, 3d, and animated content. Before graduating from Vancouver Film School, I began writing third-party technical books for large publishers such as Macromedia Press and Wiley, primarily on Macromedia Flash. To date, I have authored or co-authored over a dozen books, and contributed to and technically edited many others. I have also written on Macromedia ColdFusion and Dreamweaver, digital video, and Adobe Creative Suite. I consider my teaching experience and education beneficial to writing these technical publications, and the documentation I write today. While living in Canada, I ran a small freelance web design and development business specializing in designing and creating Flash content. I also ran a local Macromedia User Group, which held meetings to discuss using software, design, and web development. Macromedia (now Adobe) hired me in October 2004 because of my experience creating Flash content and writing technical books. I am currently the lead writer for ActionScript content, which means that I design, develop, write, technically review, and oversee the completion of large sets of documentation. I continually provide technical feedback on other sections of Flash and ActionScript documentation, to improve both the technical accuracy and usability of our documentation for our target audiences. In addition to documentation, I also create sample applications for Flash, help moderate the LiveDocs web site that lets users comment on documentation (http://livedocs.macromedia.com), participate with beta software testing, run a web log (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/dehaan), and write articles for the Macromedia/Adobe web site (http://www.macromedia.com/devnet). All of these activities lead to regular customer interaction, which allows me to gather feedback about how we can improve documentation, what resources users need to learn Flash, and determine what parts of the documentation or a tutorial leads to user difficulties. Outside of work, I continue to run my Flash forum (http://www.flash8forums.com), where I can help users and gather more feedback about the software. One reason I run the forum is to learn more about our users to improve the documentation and instructional media. The forum is excellent at helping me determine what difficulties Flash users face, the kinds of applications they build, common questions, and figure out different ways people learn Flash. Flash has always been difficult to learn; it has a steep learning curve, robust programming language, and complex user interface. Users must first figure out how to use the authoring tool, which involves a complex workflow, the concept of a timeline, and many other features. Users also face a programming language (ActionScript) to accomplish many tasks, which has quirks and changes with each Flash Player update. Our documentation team must keep on top of the many changes in the authoring tool and the sometimes revolutionary changes in ActionScript. In addition to this, Flash has a variety of users that range from artistic designers to enterprise-level developers. The documentation team needs to create instructional media for this wide audience, who might have novice to highly developed skills in Flash. Such a wide audience means that our team has complex decisions to make when creating and targeting our media. For example, the documentation needs to remember that many designers are terrified of programming, but will often need to do so to meet their goals. Similarly, application programmers might need to use design tools. In both use cases, readers are often wary, frightened, and insecure and we need to accommodate their needs adequately. Flash is a part of my daily life, and the people who use Flash are regularly a part of both my job and my free time. My interaction with our users helps me improve my skills and knowledge for teaching Flash to our customers through better documentation, sample files, and tutorials. I hope that this insight might be useful at your workshop, which sounds very interesting and valuable to me as a documentation writer and creator of instructional media. Regards, Jen deHaan Jen deHaan Sr Technical Writer Adobe Systems Incorporated 601 Townsend St, MB#269 San Francisco, CA 94103 USA 415.832.7443 jdehaan@adobe.com ~~