Rob Hanna has dedicated his professional life to improving outcomes for teams embarking on structured authoring projects. Over the past 30 years, he has worked with many large corporations on DITA and CCMS projects to bring their teams into structure and drive operational efficiencies. He has taught metadata and taxonomies at the University of Toronto and private courses on structured authoring, DITA, and information architecture. In 2013, Rob founded Precision Content in Toronto, Canada, to build a team of writers, developers, and IAs to continue his mission to raise the bar in Technical Communication.
Broken Trust, Broken Docs: Fixing the Hidden Gaps Undermining Your Technical Content
Trust isn’t just a virtue in technical communication—it’s the foundation of user confidence and loyalty. In an age of information overload, users gravitate toward content they trust and abandon what feels unreliable. This keynote will explore why trust is the ultimate value-add for your documentation and the products it supports. We’ll touch on strategies and technologies that increase your trust quotient; describe how AI can enhance credibility or erode trust depending on its implementation; and look at emerging technologies like agentive AI, blockchain, and Content-as-a-Service (CAAS) to see how they can turbocharge trust and reinforce your content as the single source of truth. Closing the trust gap requires action. Let’s start the conversation and build documentation that users trust, rely on, and return to—because in today’s digital world, few things are more valuable than trust.
In this session, attendees will learn:
- The impact of poorly written structured content on human and machine performance
- What’s needed now to improve trust in your content
- Emerging technology that could boost trust to the next level
Building Trust in Your Content: Measuring Human and Machine Performance on Technical Content
Tech pub groups continue to wrestle over exactly how generative AI will help to shape their futures. This spurs the question: Is the technology ready for us?. More likely though we should be asking if we are ready for the technology. Many of us have seen compelling demonstrations of what is possible, each footnoted with the caveat that your mileage may vary. Beware of the familiar adage: Garbage-in-Garbage-out. But who can tell you exactly what garbage looks like? Semantic enrichment, knowledge models, and metadata will only carry your content so far towards machine-readiness. It’s the precision of the content itself that will make all the difference. Join Rob Hanna for this presentation as he walks you through his approach to benchmarking and evaluating human performance on technical content. Rob will walk you through before and after content and discuss usability lab methods and results. Afterall, if you can’t figure it out, how do you expect a machine to figure it out?
In this session, attendees will learn:
- The concepts of trust in your content and what it means for usability
- Human factors for trust and issues we face with trust with generative AI
- List common issues implementors face with building LLMs and technology solutions for their businesses
- About our content usability labs for measuring human and machine performance on content
- The importance of benchmarking content against a rigorous content standard
