MadWorld Schedule: Main Conference Day 2

Hit a home run with reusable content across all your instructional design products.

In today’s fast paced digital world, 21st-century learners are time-poor multitaskers who expect flexible, engaging, and easily accessible learning resources. This demand places greater responsibility on technical writers and instructional designers, requiring them to develop content that seamlessly integrates blended learning methodologies while optimising learning experiences across multiple formats.

To meet these challenges, instructional designers must adopt smart content development strategies that maximise efficiency, maintain consistency, and enhance learner engagement across various outputs. In this session, Kylie will demonstrate how to leverage MadCap Flare to create a scalable, adaptable, and reusable content strategy that ensures learning materials remain effective and engaging while reducing duplicated work effort.

Join this session to discover how to bridge the gap between pedagogy, technology, and learner needs by efficiently repurposing content for multiple instructional formats.

AI models and Methodologies like RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) are able to ingest detailed technical content published in PDF format. But they make mistakes and even small mistakes can be expensive where every detail matters. Some forward looking enterprises in the Electronics industry have adopted best practices that have enabled them to leverage DITA and CCMS tools to enable Reliable AI.

In this session, you'll learn some of the basics of AI technologies, how AI systems presently ingest technical content. You'll also learn simple techniques that can make you a leader in enabling reliable AI for your Enterprise.

The insurance industry is undergoing a digital transformation to enhance customer experience, streamline operations, and improve service delivery. This paper explores the role of Salesforce in driving this transformation, focusing on the implementation of solutions such as Electronic First Notice of Loss (eFNOL) and Service Cloud. Using real-world experience from projects at Farmers Insurance, this study delves into key aspects like Apex development, Lightning Web Components (LWC), API integrations, and compliance considerations. The paper highlights best practices for designing scalable, high-performance Salesforce applications that align with business objectives.

Are you delivering the content your users need—or just guessing? In this session, learn how to use MadCap Flare’s built-in analytics to track user behavior, identify content gaps, and make smarter, data-backed decisions.

Through practical examples and a real-world case study, you’ll discover how to:

• Spot outdated or underperforming content
• Reduce information overload and improve relevance
• Uncover what users are really searching for
• Transform your content strategy with actionable insights

Take the guesswork out of documentation and start delivering the right content at the right time.

Description coming soon.

In this presentation, we explore how conversational AI can support complex information architecture design, following the journey from a single prompt to a comprehensive ontology for a radiation therapy department. Using ChatGPT, the project evolved through persona creation, journey maps, task analysis, information needs mapping, and ontology development using semantic triples, culminating in an AI-ready content model. Key milestones include linking clinical personas to oncology systems/applications and building a cross-application ontology to support intelligent, contextual knowledge delivery. Attendees will gain insights into how AI can accelerate and enrich taxonomy, ontology, and content model development for complex domains.

We know how adults learn. We know that a system of reinforcing learning events is critical to guiding people to proficiency. We know that adults learn through a mix of formal and informal events. We know that managers and experts are crucial in guiding people to proficiency.

And yet, we still struggle to deliver a holistic set of content to drive these interlocking interventions. It is time to shift our learning design to deliver content capable of fueling all the above options for learning.

In this session, we:

• Share the forces impeding an integrated learning approach
• Discuss the role content architecture plays in delivering dynamic learning solutions
• Why metadata plays a leading role in delivering flexible, dynamic solutions

In today's dynamic educational landscape, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach is outdated. Personalized learning, tailored to the unique learner needs, interests, and abilities, is gaining momentum within organizations. Big data analytics plays a pivotal role in this shift by providing insights into learner behavior, preferences, and performance. Learn how by analyzing data from various sources, organizations can develop adaptive learning platforms, curate personalized content, identify learners at risk, recommend tailored learning paths, and offer personalized feedback. Also, attendees will learn how innovative technologies, such as learning management systems, adaptive learning platforms, and artificial intelligence, are crucial in creating personalized learning experiences. By leveraging big data analytics and addressing any challenges (like data privacy, data quality, technological infrastructure, and educator buy-in), organizations can create engaging and effective personalized learning environments, leading to improved learning outcomes and learner satisfaction

Have you ever published a project, and later you find more than a few broken links? Maybe you’re overwhelmed at the thought of single-sourcing content by searching for and replacing repeated text? Or perhaps you made some structural changes in your project and now you’re left with unused images or undefined styles.

This session will explain how you can take full advantage of Flare's Analysis ribbon to solve these problems (and more!), and why you should take a few minutes before you publish your projects to make sure everything is running smoothly. Whether it’s fixing broken links, identifying places to add snippets and variables, rooting out unused content, or just figuring out where you’ve used certain information throughout your project, the Analysis ribbon is full of useful information that will make any project better.

In this presentation, I will share how Vasion leverages micro content in MadCap Flare to enhance the user experience by delivering relevant, contextual resources. By integrating micro content with metadata-driven displays, we empower users to discover additional information precisely when and where they need it.

I will showcase three key types of micro content implemented in our documentation:

• FAQs: Repurposed from sales collateral, these provide users with quick answers to common questions directly within relevant topics, using metadata to ensure contextual relevance.
• New Release Features: Metadata-powered displays highlight feature updates on related or tangentially related topics, helping users stay informed about product enhancements.
• How-To Content: Step-by-step procedures, tagged with metadata, appear in search results for relevant keywords, enabling users to access actionable guidance instantly.

Description coming soon.

If your technical writing department has been around a while you have legacy documents, some that may date back to the stone age of technical writing. A common tool for these legacy documents is Adobe InDesign. Now that you've decided to modernize with topic-based authoring, the problem is that there is no direct path between those documents and Madcap Flare. We all know the axiom garbage in, garbage out. The quality of your input directly impacts the quality of your output. But Madcap Flare lets you change that outcome. Garbage in, golden out.

You'll learn how to move those InDesign documents to Flare, what do you need to do every step along the way to minimize re-work, and how to set up your Import to get the golden result you want.

Finally, we'll learn where to look for re-use, and how to manage this change both up and down your management chain.

You don't have to be stuck with a tool you don't want to use, and we'll show you how to get there.

In today's fast-paced digital environment, users often have questions that require answers from multiple help sites, leading to frustration and delayed support. Chad Kreiger, Lead Technical Writer at Huron, will share with you how his team leverages MadCap Flare's micro content capabilities and meta tags to aggregate a centralized, easily searchable FAQ site. Despite the challenges of FAQ content coming from diverse sources for various audiences, learn how Huron uses meta tags behind the scenes to unify the content experience by helping users quickly filter to specific questions and answers. You will learn how to develop scalable and effective FAQs using the FAQ proxy, micro content, and meta tags. Chad will offer tips and tricks to help you avoid common pitfalls and maximize the single-sourcing tools that MadCap Flare has to offer that ultimately help you enhance user experience with your content. 

Description coming soon.

For this presentation, I’d like to focus on the centralization of systems to support decentralized content teams — and how this approach can be successfully implemented at scale. Drawing from my experience both at Cisco and in other organizations implementing learning platforms, I’ll share the efficiencies this model can unlock, along with key lessons learned along the way.

Description coming soon.

How strategically are you organizing content in your CCMS? This presentation will share how to build better content and optimize a CCMS with practices like these: Break your content down into reusable components. Combine those components with a solid information architecture. Move from defining "reuse" as copy/paste to true single-sourcing.

Complex enterprise software often integrates with external systems through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Open standards for documenting APIs have emerged, along with tools to deliver API documentation in formats consumable by both programmers and systems. Lars Hedbor, Senior Technical Writer at Huron, will demonstrate how his team used the industry-standard tool ReDoc to generate content and incorporate it into a Flare project. Using Flare’s powerful capabilities, they created a build process that generates and embeds ReDoc-formatted API documentation into a site, which also includes contextual material and navigation authored directly in Flare. You will learn how to use Flare’s Build Events capabilities and the Madbuild command-line tool to integrate Flare content into a Microsoft Azure DevOps build pipeline.

MadCap Software leads the world in its capacity to efficiently capture, protect, manage and put into use the knowledge capital of organizations. This knowledge management capacity includes developing and adapting information products, processes, and practices at the speed of change.

The degree and effectiveness with which an organization's knowledge capital can be put to use also requires the 5 Moments of Need methodology. .This proven methodology enables and sustains measurable, effective job performance, at the moments of Apply, Solve, Change, Learn New, and Learn More.

This session will show how MadCap Software addresses the full scope of enterprise knowledge management and how it can be combined with a comprehensive enablement methodology to safely unleash the full benefits of AI, structure unstructured content, automatically generate structured information products with single-source reusable content objects, and enable learning, while working, at all 5 Moments of Need.

In technical documentation, choosing the right visual medium is pivotal to enhance comprehension and engagement. Learn how to use visual elements like screenshots, GIFs, and videos to enhance technical documentation. We’ll provide tips on design principles and tools that can help create compelling visual content and showcase how each medium has its strengths. Static screenshots are ideal for illustrating specific interface elements, step-by-step instructions, or error messages, offering readers a clear and detailed view without overwhelming them. GIFs, on the other hand, excel in demonstrating short, looping actions such as menu navigation or highlighting dynamic processes, providing a balance between detail and motion, and lastly, videos are best suited for complex workflows, intricate procedures, or interactive features where a sequential, narrated walkthrough can offer a comprehensive understanding. Selecting the appropriate format depends on the complexity of the task, the need for motion, and the level of detail required to effectively convey the information to the audience.