Chuck Martin's Portfolio Page
From this page you can view a variety of documentation and other content I've designed and developed, some other work that I've done, and my resume.
Writing Samples
| Box Help | Here are some samples from my work at Box: |
| Improving a Topic | This is an example of how I improve the content experience. At Box, I had a small ticket to add information about how to configure a firewall to allow the functionality of the support and product documentation site. When I first looked at the topic, it seemed disorganized and not well structured, as well as missing some conceptual information. So I added some conceptual information at the start of the topic, then reorganized the content and added subheadings to aid in navigation and findability. |
| Agari Incident Response Help | This is a help system for a SaaS security product that was developed in MadCap Flare. The documentation was oroginally produced as a PDF file, and I designed the help output to match company branding. The concept of the product was somewhat complex and required detailed explanation, even though the target audience was sexurity professionals. |
| UX Writing/UX Design Hackathon | I attended a 2019 UX Writers meetup event, UX Writers & UX Designers Unite: A Mini Hackathon where for the mini hackathon, we divided into teams. In one hour, my 3-person team was able to come up with the designs and UI text for a caregiver app. Specifically, we were tasked with designing the login and basic information entry screens. We took first place, and one of the things the judges mentioned in their summary was the app's comfortable, conversational text, which is what I drove in our group. This PDF is what we designed. |
| Job Application Writing Exercise | This is part of an exercise I performed as part of an application I made to a San Francisco company in the fall of 2017. It is a rewritten manual page coded in Markdown and hosted on GitHub. |
| ItsOn Service Design Center Help | This is the help system I worked on for more than 3 years to support Service Design Center, a SaaS application for cellular companies to manage their network, their product catalog, and their customers. It is all original content. I began developing the content in Atlassian Confluence, but Confluence turned out to be a poor choice for a Help Authoring Tool (HAT). I researched SaaS-based tools and chose HelpIQ, which was sold during the time I was developing content for ItsOn and was rebranded as ProProfs Knowledgebase. I exported the entirety of the help system and have been re-creating it in Adobe RoboHelp. The current sample is a partial one, being hosted on GitHub, and will grow over time until it is complete. What is there demonstrates my writing style and how I organize the content for this application. Note that some links, primarily ones to topics that have yet to be added to this sample, do not yet work. Also, there is a bug in RoboHelp that does not automatically open books that contain topics on the first click, but you can view the topic associated with the book by clicking the book a second time. |
| ItsOn Micro-Content Strategy | One of my first tasks at ItsOn was to review and clean up the web application's UI content. This describes the process I went through and the micro-content strategy I developed. |
| Tight Writing | First is an example of what I call tight writing: Writing that is lean, clean, clear, and focused on user goals. |
| Horizon Line User & Maintenance Guide | This is a document prepared for a contract client who designed and built a permanently installed data visualization system. They wanted a document that would allow the customer to do basic maintenance and troubleshooting without the need to call support. In the pre-hire interview, I asked a number of questions about how the devices worked and how the customer would use them. My questioning led to the company's engineers to automate some functions and make the system simpler. This also resulted in a shorter, simpler document. This illustrates the common fallacy that a technical writer needs to be a domain expert to be successful. I knew nothing about the specific technology going in, yet my background in and knowledge of technology allowed me to first ask intelligent questions when I was in the interview stage and then learn about the specific technology and its users during the documentation development process. |
| QuickBooks UI Content | One of my responsibilities at Intuit was content within the application UI, the first level of user assistance. On two different teams, Online Banking and Forms Customization, I wrote the content for two wizards. |
| Rivio Help Sample | Next is a substantial section of an HTML-based help file for a web application. I've extracted the sections I designed, organized, and wrote. The original ran within a proprietary XML framework; I've extracted the content and duplicated the organization with DevaHelp, a Dreamweaver extension that was developed by online help expert Ben Weisner. |
| Rivio Setup and Configuration Guide | The next sample is a PDF file of an administration guide. |
| eVox
Web User Guide eVox Rater Guide |
These two samples are for users of an internal system. One is a user guide for a web application; the other is instructions for using a phone-based application, and it was designed to be printed double-sided on 8.5" x 11" paper (two sheets), then folded to make a 5.5" x 8.5" booklet. |
| Project InVision Help | This sample is an HTML-based help system for a web application. It was developed in RoboHTML. The content was almost entirely rewritten and reorganized to make it task-based. The keyword index is completely new. And I designed a "skin" to match the look and feel of the application itself. (Note: the browser-sniffing code RoboHelp used to generate JavaScript-based navigation back on the early 2000s causes the navigation pane to not display in Google Chrome for Windows.) |
| Timogen Adaptive Controller User Guide Timogen Adaptive Controller Help |
This sample contains both a PDF version and an online Help version of documentation I wrote for Timogen Systems. As a contractor, I was not involved early with the development team and came on-board when the project was nearing release. Thus, I was unable to do a lot of planning and estimating, but rather had to dive in, learn about the product specifics, and start writing. I quickly defined the area I needed to document and tracked my progress in each area. I single-sourced content in Adobe FrameMaker and used Quadralay WebWorks Publisher to create the online help, making some changes to the template files to create the Timogen-specific look-and-feel. |
| Java Primer for Help Authors | In the late 90s, I took a Java Programming class. A couple of companies had created Java-based help systems. I gave a presentation at the 1999 WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance on Java programming and the new help technologies. |
WritersUA Newsletters
I attended nearly every WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance. And for more than a dozen years, I created daily conference newsletters, including information gathering, writing, photography, and production. Here are some samples of those newsletters, all in PDF format.
I also live blogged from sessions in recent years, and this list also includes links to some of those blogs.
2012: Monday Tuesday Wednesday blog
2011: Monday Tuesday Wednesday blog
2010: Monday Tuesday Wednesday blog
2009: Monday Tuesday Wednesday blog
2008: Monday Tuesday
2007: Monday Tuesday
2006: Monday Tuesday Wednesday
2005: Monday Tuesday Wednesday
1999: Monday Tuesday Wednesday
LavaCon Newsletters
In 2012-3, 2019, and 2023-4, I attended the LavaCon Conference, and in some of those years I produced a daily newsletter and blogged for that conference as well.
2024: Monday Tuesday Wednesday blog 2023: Sunday Monday Tuesday blog 2012: Sunday Monday Tuesday blog
Resume
My general purpose resume is available in PDF form, and you can also read more details about me, my passions, and my journey.