Further information on entries and winners appears in the Winter issue of Communicator of the same year. Online issues of Communicator are available to ISTC members only after logging in.
UK Technical Communication Awards
The winners were announced as part of our online TCUK conference on Tuesday 24 September 2024.
Awards were given to:
- One Overall Winner,
- One Merit Award Winner with Judges’ Commendation; and
- Four Merit Award Winners
Overall Winner (Trophy Winner)
Calder Communication Services Limited (Fi Parker and Matt Peacock) and Sandford Tech Limited (Kevin Puryer, Matt Sanders and Joe Duffy)
Dry Dive Virtual Reality App
The Dry Dive Virtual Reality App, which coaches a learner through a 5-metre scuba dive descent, was created with two purposes:
- To demonstrate how virtual reality (VR) can be used as a training aid to teach and practise complex procedures.
- To show the quality of VR applications that Calder Communication Services can produce.
The app is intended for two groups of clients: Training managers in the defence engineering sector and technical training managers in other sectors who may be looking for ways to train more safely.
It is a very innovative way to deliver training material and dramatically life-like. The attention to detail was brilliant, for example including the diving buddy in the training scenario. The app solves many prospective problems for customers, one being the fact they only need the VR device that can be brought anywhere and takes up very little space.
Every detail was thought about and scripted for. The work that Sanford Tech did was incredible as well. The dedication they showed, including participating in a diving session with full gear on so they could really experience what they were trying to create paid off. This is an outstanding training application.
The Dry Dive Virtual Reality App is a very worthy winner of the UKTC Awards 2024 competition; the entrants deserve to succeed in future collaborative ventures.
Merit Award Winner (Judges’ Commendation)
The i-Team (Motia Khan)
Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Horticulture Manual and Training Guides
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) revised edition of the Horticulture Manual along with training guides were produced by The i-Team as part of CWGC’s global training programme to implement best practices in the management and maintenance of the two world war cemeteries and memorial sites; these are at 23,000 locations and in more than 150 countries. Looking after that global estate is a multinational and multilingual workforce numbering thousands of employees and volunteers – mostly gardeners and stone masons.
The manual has been written in simple English (with photos and illustrations) for the target audience. The manual was also translated to multiple languages and includes training programmes at various levels. The i-Team succeeded in delivering the product in 12 months within budget to the specified quality with a rigorous review and approval process.
The judges were given a comprehensive walk-through of sections of the manual with the opportunity to explore ancillary topics. The value of the style guide was in evidence showing quality and consistency of material.
In addition to the Merit Award the judges gave a commendation for this entry in recognition of the i-Team’s passion for their subject; and with this project to draw attention to the important role of technical writers and their work, that often goes unnoticed.
Merit Award Winner
Diana Lakatos
Crafting Docs for Success: An End-to-End Approach to Developer Documentation
The author’s stated purpose in writing this book was to:
- Share my knowledge and help everyone involved in building developer documentation by providing a flexible blueprint that can be adjusted to their own projects.
- Collect useful resources in one place.
This book came into existence from feedback the author received from the UK Technical Communication awards judges in 2019!
A lot of work has gone into creating this book. Taking the writing of it aside, which would have been a feat, the hard work put into the project of creating developer documentation is incredible. The author has done an amazing job on both counts.
There is significant specific detail on how to create developer documentation. The level of detail and the content in the book was impressive. The work that went into creating the developer docs is incredible. It is a great step-by-step approach.
This is an impressive entry from the original planning stages, through design and structure to execution. The author is entitled to be satisfied with the product as a comprehensive and consistent manual.
Merit Award Winner
Service Now (Liz Malone, Namita Roy, Tushar Rai, Venkata Bala Subrahmanyam Isukapalli, Shirley Ask)
Now Assist for Customer Service Management (CSM)
The Now Assist for Customer Service Management (CSM) application is used by customer service agents to summarise case information and chats as well as generate case resolution notes. The documentation is targeted for admin and developer personas to configure this application for implementation on their ServiceNow instance.
The Now Assist for CSM content is kept together in one area and separate from the rest of CSM content. to keep all the content one area. This is a new and popular product, and there were only six weeks available for the design and completion of the initial release; then later releases were managed on a two-month delivery cycle.
The basic organisation of the material adhered to the company’s content framework, which includes a landing page, exploring section, configuring section, and a using section. The judges recognised that the design was well thought out and fulfilled its brief well. An essential element of the success of this entry was the video included in the product; this video explored Now Assist for CSM in good detail and at a useful level. The provision of screenshots was highly effective.
Merit Award Winner
Codat (Experience@Codat) (Polina Zaichkina)
Codat Docs
Codat Docs is a documentation portal that is complementary to Codat’s product suite. These products allow companies such as banks, payment providers, fintechs, and more, to connect to the software their small business clients use, access their business data, get insights from that data, and automate their accounting processes.
Codat Docs contains guides for beginners, product- and use case-specific tutorials and guides, API references and technical implementation details for the full suite of products, and general usage details for our APIs and integrations.
It is a challenging task to write documentation that needs to cater for users with varying degrees of knowledge, but this guide has achieved this task very well. There are various places where there is a table at the top specifying the audience and the knowledge needed. It is good to see this information up front.
This is a particularly good example of great documentation. The entry said there are two people in the Experience team who brought the entry to this level. It is a credit to both members as you can see the hard work that has gone into creating this portal.
Having embedded code snippets of the various coding languages was a nice touch as qas the ability to toggle back and forth. It was very easy to navigate through and it was a natural flow. The landing page is clear on where you can find everything you could need. The stated objective has been met very well with care taken on presentation to convey information to best effect.
Merit Award Winner
IBM Corporation (Carol Bahruth, Bethany Simpson, Yi Chen ‘Erin’ Zhang)
IBM® z/OS® Container Platform (zOSCP)
The background information contained in the brief was useful in conveying the scope of the document, and the diverse audience including information architects and developers. It was particularly helpful to understand how the team got from point zero to the end product in this case.
The architecture diagrams were created in Figma, using a library that was created with the visual designer, to ensure consistency in presenting the basic concepts of what is the container platform. The team defined and colour-coded symbols for the various personas to guide the users to the information specific to their roles.
The team consisted of three writers – one in New York, one in the UK, and one in China. They used the time zones to advantage to work round the clock and always be available for the development teams!
Explaining the conventions used in the documentation and a link to the glossary was good to see. This is something that can easily be missed from a document, but it is important.
The planning and management of the development and review cycles have facilitated exceptional quality documentation.