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.

Introducing MadCap Prism—our next-generation web rendering engine designed to deliver powerful, flexible, and immersive content experiences. In this session, we’ll showcase how Prism enhances your team’s ability to deliver rich, responsive content across platforms. Learn about its key capabilities, the added value it brings to your content strategy, and get the latest updates on its current status and release timeline.

Are you delivering the content your users need—or just guessing? In this session, learn how to use MadCap Flare’s 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• Spot outdated or underperforming content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.

Flare Online continues to evolve rapidly, delivering new capabilities that empower teams to create, collaborate, and publish more efficiently than ever before. In this session, we’ll take a look back at the key enhancements released this year—focusing on how they’re improving workflows, enabling real-time collaboration, and streamlining content management.

We’ll also offer a forward-looking perspective on what’s coming next. From styling improvements to publishing enhancements and beyond, you’ll get a high-level preview of the roadmap and how upcoming features are designed to support modern content development needs.

Whether you're a seasoned Flare user or exploring what’s possible in the cloud, this session will provide valuable insights into how Flare Online is growing to meet the future of content creation.

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.

If you think AI for L&D stops at writing assistance, think again. You’re missing out.

Want to understand your content at a deeper more actionable level? Want to use your proprietary content to power a chat bot without having to train or fine tune it? Does the idea of having semantic-powered search across all of your content excite you? Then come explore how structured content unlocks AI capabilities that go far beyond basic generation.

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. 

As the tools and technologies of technical communication evolve—ushering in structured authoring, DITA, and a growing focus on user experience—many writers wonder if traditional skills still carry weight. The answer is a resounding yes. This presentation explores how the foundational strengths of a seasoned technical writer—clear, concise writing; audience awareness; and a mindset for minimalism—are not only still relevant but essential in today’s landscape. We’ll examine how these core competencies translate into success with DITA, modular content, taxonomy design, and UX collaboration, and how embracing new methodologies doesn't mean discarding what made you effective in the first place. Whether you're navigating DITA maps or wireframes, your traditional skill set remains your greatest asset—only now, it has a broader field to shine.

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.

Whether you're just getting started or you're a seasoned Flare user, this session will show you how to take your outputs to the next level with practical tips and creative approaches. Learn how to tap into Flare’s dynamic built-in features, and explore how JavaScript can be used to add custom functionality that improves the user experience. You’ll walk away with actionable techniques you can implement immediately to create engaging deliverables.

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.