In this section: Design to Meet the Needs of Clients |
As a process helps structure your activities in a project, principles can guide that work. The primary principle guiding technical communicators is that real people should be able to use the information we provide to complete real tasks. To meet this goal, technical communicators have "shown a highly pragmatic tendency to appropriate diverse models and incorporate whatever works" with the aim of achieving "valued human performance" (Sherry and Wilson, p.20).
Human performance occurs on two levels (Carliner, 1997):
The information we provide is essential to success in both types of performance. Poorly relayed or inadequate information prevents users from successfully performing tasks. "Often the information that performers receive is incorrect or out of date. They receive too little or too much. Sometimes they don’t even know where to get it. (Stock, p.9.) As a result, our clients do not generate the intended level of sales and they must provide extra¾ though unnecessary¾ assistance. That drives up their cost of doing business.
By following a series of related principles, you can design and develop technical communication products that promote successful performance.
These principles fall into two categories:
The next several sections explore these principles.
Users perform best when they have the information they need in a timely and understandable manner. But what makes information timely and understandable? Timely and understandable information is accessible physically, intellectually, and emotionally to users. The principles of communiation design are intended to help you provide users with easy physical, intellectual, and emotional access to information.
When users consult a technical communication product, they seek a specific piece of information. Physical access refers to their ability to quickly and easily find it.
Consider, for example, that you are looking up the population of Malawi in a printed encyclopedia.
You learned how to follow this procedure when you first started using encyclopedias in grade school. But information is not so easily found in other communication products. Sometimes information is so buried and inaccessible that users waste "precious time and keystrokes in attempting to retrieve it" (Sherry & Wilson, p. 28). IBM labels the inability of users to find information as a productivity problem (V. Atkinson, 1991). The principles of document design address these issues of physical access to information. Document design is a series of "principles that can make documents...easier to read and understand" (Felker, Pickering, Charrow, Holland, and Redish, 1981).
Designing for physical access requires an understanding of how users search for information. Generally, users employ a number of approaches and tools to find information. Studies indicate that, if given a choice, users would first consult another person. The most likely person is the person at the next desk or workstation, followed by someone on the telephone. Only after exhausting these possibilities do users consult a communication product, such as a user’s guide or a reference manual. (Sherry & Wilson, p. 21, Crook)
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| When users have a question, many first prefer to ask others... | ....then call the help line... | ...and, last, consult the information provided to them. |
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Within a communication product, users employ various strategies to search for information. In many instances, someone teaches users how to search for information. For example, just as your teachers taught you how to use an encyclopedia, someone teaches you to use school textbooks, read novels, and locate telephone numbers and addresses in a telephone directory. When you encounter a similar product in the future, you would employ similar search strategies.
Research on reading has yielded insights into how people find information once they have consulted a communication product. Certain aspects of pages and screens attract readers’ attention, others repel it. For example, headings on a page immediately attract readers’ atention, as noted in the example about the encyclopedia. Pictures, too, attract attention. A group of principles within document design suggests how to apply this knowledge by placing elements on a page or screen to attract users’ attention to information of interest.
Timing also plays a key role in document design: that is, making current information available at the moment users need it. Consider a computer training class that teaches participants how to prepare tables of contents and indexes. Yet participants do not produce a table of contents or index for several months after the class. By the time they perform these tasks, they have forgotten how to do so, nor do they remember how to find the information. Or, consider the sales catalog that has out-of-date products because the sales force is too busy selling to revise the catalog. Potential customers might try to order products that the company no longer produces. Providing users with the right information at the wrong time, or the wrong information at the right time, both represent issues of timing.
Perhaps users can easily find the information they need at the moment they need it. But once they find it, can users easily understand the information and make use of it? The ability to comprehend and act on information is intellectual access to information.
Designing for intellectual access requires an understanding of how users acquire, process, and store information, as well as how adults users learn.
How Users Acquire, Process, and Store Information: The science that studies how people acquire, process, and store information is called cognitive psychology. Studies of the human mind suggest that it acquires, processes, and stores information in much the same way that computers process information.
In a nutshell, humans process information like this:
Unlike RAM, however, humans cannot add additional memory to increase capacity. We’re stuck with the 7 plus or minus two items.
This limitation of short term memory has significant effects on effective communication. Because users can only handle so much information at a given moment, communicators must limit the amount of information.
If they have a lot of information to share, communicators must "chunk" it together, that is, put like information together into a single chunk, so that the users perceive that they are receiving only one piece of information, rather than 5 or six. For example, when you share a telephone number, rather than providing users with a string of numbers, you present a few groups of numbers. In North America, for example, phone numbers are cited as an:
612 |
555 |
1213 |
area code |
exchange |
extension |
so rather than providing users with 10 digits, the communicator provides them with three numbers. 10 digits exceeds the capacity of short-term memory; three numbers does not.
This, too, has implications to technical communicators. To make sure that users remember information where and when they need it, technical communicators must present it in such a way that users can easily recall it. Users more easily recall information that they use regularly or for which they have an easily remembered code to retrieve. For example, if you call a certain co-worker every day, you have likely memorized their telephone number. Similarly, when asked to set passwords for computers, many users use numbers or names that they can easily recall.
In addition, research into the readability of prose has suggested ways that technical communicators can speed the flow of information into long-term memory and increase the likelihood that users will comprehend¾ understand¾ the information in the way we intended.
How Adult Users Learn: Most technical communication products are intended for adults, and adults learn differently than children.
This has implications for technical communicators. We must "sell" the information to users before actually presenting it to them by demonstrating the relevance. In addition, as communicators present information to users, we need to regularly remind users how they can apply the information. In other words, users tend to reject purely theoretical and abstract information; they prefer guidelines and tips they can immediately apply.
The implication to communicators is that they must understand the previous knowledge and experiences of their users and design communication products that take into account that previous experience. In the example of the teleconferencing equipment, the communicator needs to familiarize novice users with the equipment. In the example of the physics article, the communicator needs to avoid repeating the obvious.
Perhaps users can easily find information and comprehend it. But if some aspect of the information offends users or fails to resonate with then, they won’t use it. For example, suppose you are sharing information from an interview with a member of the client organization. You provide everyone in the meeting with a transcript of the interview. The manager, however, is terribly offended, because he believes that the transcript, which is confidential, will be distributed widely within the organization and reflect poorly on his staff. A tool that you expected to facilitate communication actually impeded it.
Even if information is easy to find and comprehend, if users take offense with it, they will not accept it. Emotional access, the last type of access, refers to our ability to design communication products that users will positively respond to.
Theories of rhetoric offer a number of insights into how to design communication products that users will positively respond to. The most basic theories of rhetoric explore communication as a process, that has a sender, receiver, and a message.
Noise in the process prevents the message from being properly received by the receiver. In some instances, the noise comes from limited physical or intellectual access. But in many instances, it comes from limited emotional access.
One type of emotional access is cultural. When communicators from one culture try to communicate with people from another, they might not communicate information in such a way that meets the prevailing local customs. In some instances, the communication represents a bias towards the communicator’s culture. The study of feminist critique within rhetoric has identified ways that text, in the past, has represented a bias towards men and has suggested specific techniques for avoiding this type of bias in the future. Similarly, the study of African American critique has shown how the text in the past has had a bias of a majority culture, and offers specific technqiiues for avoiding this type of bias, too.
These cultural biases have become glaringly apparent as companies have tried to expand into markets in other countries but because their products and their literature reflect their native biases, they have not been able to communicate with the larger culture. For example, one company that produces household products did not alter its designs to the prevailing local aesthetic. As a result, people in other countries thought the product was unattractive and did not purchase it. A special branch of technical communication focuses on ways to take an existing product and tailor it for other markets, a process called localization.
But even if technical communicators are not writing for users in other countries, we need to "localize" our work so that users can relate to it. The ability to relate to material is not only an isue of intelletual access, then, it is also an issue of emotional access.
Expectations are the second type of emotional access. Users bring many expectations to information. They expect to search for information in a given way. They expect to find certain information. They expect to complete the task in a certain amount of time. The study of genres within the field of rhetoric suggests that certain types of communication occur regularly and have certain features. For a piece of communication that purports to be an example of that type of communication, it must have those certain features¾ that is, meet certain expectations. For example, suppose you go to a movie that is labelled a comedy. You expect to laugh. If you do not laugh, it will not meet your expectations.
This, too, has implications for technical communicators. We must identify the expectations of users up front, then¾ at the least¾ meet them to satisfy them and¾ at the most¾ exceed those expectations so we "delight" our users.
Not only do technical communicators want to delight our users, we want to delight our clients. As mentioned earlier, technical communication is a service and it is inteded to serve the client. We do so by meeting the needs of our clients’ users.
Our clients bring many expectations to our work. The more thoroughly we can identify those expectations up front, the more likely we are to meet them. And if we meet or exceed those expectations, we can anticipate that we will have future opportunities to work with that client in the future. And retaining clients is ultimately the goal of a successful service provider.
Clients assess the value of our work in a variety of ways. According to Lola Fredrickson (1990), clients assess quality in these ways:
Similarly, providing outstanding customer service ultimately involves the clients’ ability to trust you to meet their needs. You ultimately demonstrate your effectiveness through your deeds, not by your words.
Effective communication has the power to change lives and change the courses of entire communities. For example, The Economist reports that after the introduction of the telephone to farming villages in India, for example, income doubled because farmers had access to more accurate information on prevailing prices and could get a better price for their crops.
As technical communicators go through the process of assessing needs, designing communication products, and developing and producing them, our focus becomes increasingly detailed. By the time we distribute the communication product to users, we tend to lose track of why we perform this work .
We do so because information is power and when we provide it to people, we empower them.
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(c) Copyright. 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. Saul Carliner. All rights reserved.
