Technical Communication morphs and changes into Information Design
25 June 2008 Our colleague Alison Reynolds from the GDID programme has just published an article in the Southern Communicator (the journal of TCANZ) proposing the profession redefine itself as 'information design'. It's about time the industry faced this rather difficult decision. We suspect the debate won't be popular in some parts of the world, nor some parts of the industry, because it's about re-defining what the industry is and does.Alison has given her permission for us to reproduce some key comments here. (The full article is only available to members on the TCANZ web site.) She starts by tracing the development of technical communication.
It is clear from the feedback given by GDID students that there is a strong demand for people with these skills. There is almost a hundred percent employment rate of GDID graduates, although to be fair, many are already in employment while they are doing the course. Students report that the information design skills they gain from the course are valuable to them and their employers, and helped them do things at work they couldn't do before.As new technology became more accessible to the public, the demand by consumers for products with supporting documentation grew rapidly. Technical writers became technical communicators as they found themselves responsible for more than effective writing. They needed to ensure that documentation was aimed at the users’ needs rather than just a ‘tack-on’ at the end of product development. Therefore, their roles changed to include competencies, such as audience analysis, document design and computing tools to produce a variety of information ‘packages’ to meet the users’ needs.
Practitioners now need a broad range of skills that are more focused on problem-solving approaches to communication needs that occur in commerce, health, education, as well as in the traditional areas of science, computing and electronics. I believe that it is these changes in the core competencies of technical communication that drive a need to redefine the profession as ‘information design’.So what are these competencies? Our industry and academic advisors carefully monitor the competencies taught in our programme that includes the following courses:
- writing and editing (still a ‘must have’)
- current research and practice (international information trends, localization, interviewing skills, ethics, group dynamics, personal skills)
- information management (content management, single sourcing, task analysis, project management)
- information design (design strategies for online and paper information products)
- usability testing.
No doubt these competencies will continue to change as the profession meets more information challenges. The only way to keep up is to take up the challenge of learning new skills through further education."
This tells us that re-defining technical communication in the broader terms of information design is more than likely going to make people more employable, and considering the economic times we live in, this has to be a good thing.
Greg and Bruce
Labels: information design
posted by Greg on Wednesday, June 25, 2008,
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Ground Zero: where customer experience and information management intersect
02 April 2008 I consult in several areas, including usability design and information management. Sometimes this seems a little schizophrenic, so it’s good to pull back and think ‘where are the commonalities in these subjects?’This little cautionary tale is intended to point out where some of these important commonalities lie.
Recently I had a nightmare of a time trying to claim on the extended warranty on an ipod I had purchased just a year ago. The screen cracked, by the way, which effectively means: new ipod time. But that’s not the story.
The real story is the customer (or ‘user’) experience I had while trying to make my claim. And that’s the link between information management and user experience. When the user is, quite simply the customer, and the experience is the provision by a corporate entity of adequate service across a range of communication media: then the connection between these two areas of professional endeavour is thrown into high relief.
My customer experience problem was getting any service at all, and the obstacle - which reduced me to incoherent rage over several weeks – was information management. Specifically, the fact that information was not being managed at all.
To start with, in January, I tried emailing the company with full details of my claim including my warranty reference number. An automated reply told me I had to ring them, during business hours. I’m in NZ, they’re in the UK, that’s an expensive option that happens in the middle of the night.
So I rang them and quoted my reference number. I explained the whole story. I had the wrong number: “You want Worldwide Cover, it’s another department”. But my agreement, which was a WWC one, gave me the number I had rung. So I rung the other number. Great! No problem, I just had to get a service technician to certify on letterhead paper that the ipod is jiggered, and fax them. I got the letter, I wrote a covering letter, with the reference number, I photocopied my receipt as well. I faxed it.
In the end I faxed it more than 40 times, thoughout February. In total I devoted most of a day to faxing it. I even got it to go through once – on try #18 – on the other 39 tries the fax number was busy.
When I rang to follow up on the successful faxing, I found no one had my fax: “It must be in another department” – apparently on Mars. I had this mad idea that faxes would be scanned and entered in the customer database, linked to my agreement by the reference number, so any call centre staff member could access it.
Fool!
I took the names of the helpful staff. Every time I rang back and asked for a name, no one knew the person I had spoken to: “He must work in another department”. Where were the other departments, were they really on Mars? Apparently there was no staff address book or contact database that covered all the departments.
One person, in late February, on learning of my fax debacle, gave me his email address. Apparently this was a big secret and I wasn’t to let on about it to anyone. He offered to receive an email with a scanned attachment containing my pathetic documentation, which he would print to hard copy and convey (actually walk down the hall, carrying, mind you!) to the ‘right Department’. I scanned and emailed.
I followed up by phone, but no one knew this guy either. What’s more, their database had no record of any communication from me after my first call in early January. I imagined, since I quoted the same reference number every time, that they were building up a charming picture of our history together.
How naïve – if they could do that, they’d eventually realise where the ‘black spots’ in their customer experience were, and f’ing well fix them. I was past angry by now, I was incandescent. Then I despaired. I gave up at this point. Just wrote the whole thing off as a lesson to never buy extended warranty again.
Then, two weeks later, I got the email, from Worldwide Cover, they had my letter (dated 16 January, I have no idea if it is the faxed copy or the scanned copy). They would pay out in not more than 28 days, a stirling cheque, to my address. I emailed back, even though they didn’t tell me to, just to make sure they knew I was still alive. And I waited.
Twenty days passed, and I got the letter, I ripped it open with trembling hands… no cheque. All the information in this letter was the same as in the email, except they stated the value they would reimburse (a generous sum, mind you). And they told me that I would receive the reimbursement in not more than 28 days. That’s another 28 days, by the way, and the letter was dated a week after the email, so ‘28 days’ is clearly code for ‘an amount of time we cannot or will not commit ourselves to specifying’… I assume they haven’t seen the zombie movie of the same name, or perhaps they have a better sense of humour than I imagine.
But the point of the story is… this worldwide ‘leading brand’ company have given me a ‘user experience’ that has killed their brand stone dead. It’s not even nailed to the perch, it’s on the bottom of the cage gathering dust.
And the reason for this sad demise is that they have a bunch of automated systems: customer records, staff records, call centre records, mail management - with absolutely no over-arching processes or systems to manage the totality of information received about my claim. Their staff were generally helpful, but with the tools they’ve been given, they can’t actually help anyone.
Every time I called it was like Groundhog Day, back to the first time. Not only do they not provide an adequate service, but the company don’t even know that they aren’t doing it! So from the company’s perspective the problem does not exist. When I email them the link to this blog post (after I bank the cheque, mind you!) – they won’t know what the heck I’m talking about.
But thanks to them, I now know exactly where user experience assessment and information management intersect. And I’m standing right there, at ground zero, glowing with impotent rage, brightly enough to be seen from the moon.
Labels: information design, information management, user experience
posted by Bruce on Wednesday, April 02, 2008,
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A web design company that talks about info design
12 March 2008 This must be one of the few web design companies I've seen in NZ that talks about information design: Click Suite based in Wellington (no surprise there - Wellington is where most of the best web work is happening in NZ, IMHO).Click Suite were also responsible for the UI of these two cool web sites by the National Library in Wellington:
- PastPapers - which "contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1840 to 1915 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand." You can search for keywords across the scanned papers and the keywords are highlighted for you onscreen over the original scan. Nice work.
- Publications New Zealand - which gives public access to information in the huge National Bibliography of things published in New Zealand "from the earliest days of New Zealand publishing through to the present." This site is interesting in using an XML back-end and XSLT to deliver XHTML to the browser. Dat's some clever shit, and it's good to see more web people in NZ know about this stuff.
Labels: information design, web design
posted by Greg on Wednesday, March 12, 2008,
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Why can't the farmer and the cowman just be friends? or... Why every town needs its own Marshall
17 January 2008 Plenty of organisations are starting to realise they need to clean up their websites from time to time – so they hire in the usability posse. Like US Marshalls on the lawless Frontier, they call the Pinkerton Agency and hire some detectives from ‘out East’ who sweep in, clean up the outlaws who’ve been raiding the railroad, and then ride out again. Job done.Or is it…?
I recently went back and read over a website evaluation I wrote a year ago, and then had a look at the website itself. I was flattered, they’d implemented almost all my recommendations. Clearly my massive invoice had had an effect on them! But after a couple of minutes poking about I was forced to ask myself, is this a fully user-centred website?
Well… not really.
The problem, kids, is this. UCD is an iterative process. You do it, you wait for the dust to settle, you do it again. As many times as it takes: “How many times?”
The answer to that question is: “Well, partner, how much string have you got?”
So anyway, this site was much better. It now has one set of navigation, which shows the second level pages in each section. The page headings generally match the menu headings. The home page content focuses on user needs, rather than corporate self-inflation.
But the execution of the recommendations wasn’t done by people who know what user experience really means. The information architecture is still confusing, with 13 top level headings instead of the eight I recommended. The top level pages in each section don’t point clearly to the pages on the next level down – instead they’re as splattered with links as the survivors of a paint factory explosion.
But worst of all, apart from the homepage, the writing has not improved one jot. No topic sentences, no judicious placement of key words for SEO purposes, and more random bullets than a drive-by shooting.
Reading this kind of stuff is tiring, because your brain is doing two things at once, reading the words, and trying to remember them long enough to make sense of entire paragraphs at a time. Good online writing flows like Guinness, you don’t notice it happening at the time, but by the end of the glass, you know what you’ve been drinking.
I’m going to have to reform the posse and ride back into town to clean up the cattle rustlers we missed last time - while we were tidying up the railroad.
Maybe this time the clients will decide they need to hire their own lawman to keep the peace in Silver City when the Pinkerton Men have all gone home. There’s really no replacement for having a web content manager who can actually manage the content in a consistent and user-advocating way.
Contract resources can ‘make it nice’ for a brief period, but if the website is genuinely alive, it won’t stay ‘nice’ for long. The clients need to realise they are committed to an ongoing process, which they either manage properly in-house, or keep tap-tapping regularly on that telegraph to call the hired guns back again from St Louis.
Labels: IA, information design, usability, web design
posted by Bruce on Thursday, January 17, 2008,
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Defining information architecture
20 December 2007 Patrick Kennedy of StepTwo has published an excellent summary of the many faces of information architecture.Bruce and I have talked a bit recently about how IA seems to mean different things in different countries and in different industries. We've noticed that what people mean and expect when they use the term 'IA' can be highly variable, and this is one of the few useful explanations we've seen of how all these practices can be seen to fit and work together.
I'm not so sure the split between the skills and outcomes and the faces of IA are as clear-cut in this country, or other countries, as Patrick states, but it is certainly a useful tool to help people determine what skills they made need when putting together a project team, for instance.
In New Zealand the term IA seems to be connected strongly with the IT industry and systems design, which is unfortunate because it cuts off a whole raft of what I'd call 'information design" skills that organisations can benefit from in an IA person.
It would be good if Patrick's article helped change some thinking around IA in New Zealand.
Labels: IA, information design
posted by Greg on Thursday, December 20, 2007,
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Defining information design
04 December 2007 TCANZ have provided some useful definitions of information design, in the Issue 11, April 2007 edition of their Southern Communicator journal.I was re-reading some old articles and found this good definition of information design by Greg Pendlebury and Janice Leong. The journal is for members only, so have reproduced it here.
Information design = Users + Content + DesignThey also provide a good definition of an information designer:
Information design is a discipline that focuses on communication design where the information is needed to support a user in some action, decisionmaking or process. It is a collaborative process of research, writing, design and testing.
Information designers are content developers that may have a background in writing or in graphic design or in user research. They work across all of these areas in solving communication problems. Information designers work to understand the users, the context and the information required. Information designers strive to be advocates for the users.They certainly do.
Labels: information design
posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 04, 2007,
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Mission Impossible: Usability business strategy
14 August 2007 For some time I’ve been working with some web-designing friends of mine at Wired Internet Group, based here in Christchurch, New Zealand. We’ve been trying to develop a range of services around usability assessment.This is challenging, because in the local commercial environment, very few clients see any value in spending money on usability. A few of the big B-to-C transactional players have gone into this, but hardly anyone else sees usability as either important or (I suspect) affordable.
This has presented me with a few challenges in trying to build a career in usability.
"You can do the maths: paucity of clients equals paucity of income, right?"Right. So I’ve tried a few tricks.
First we ‘productised’ the website expert review, by building in some user interviews. Not a full round of testing, but a guided walk-through with three users, combined with a comprehensive review. This was good, but still entailed a bit of work, and limited uptake. We needed - I was told - a ‘leg opener’ to get clients on board.
So next we tried a rather clever trick involving analysing customer enquiries to some major brand sites. The idea was that this would reveal ‘stress points’ where users were asking for information that was on the site, but obscured by usability issues. Brilliant! Limited uptake: too clever for our own good.
Finally (and this does sound like the three bears, I know) we got it ‘just right’.
This offering was a short review of homepage usability issues, based on a standard assessment form that could be completed in about 20 minutes and gave a percentile score across twenty variables organised under four main criteria. The report was organised around the four criteria, illustrated with screenshots and focusing severely on a pithy summary and accompanying recommendations: in other words - saleable, action-oriented and brief.
So we had a winner – but how to sell it? Luckily the answer came from my web design service partners. A session spent uploading liquid inspiration with a PR consultant mate of theirs came up trumps.
The plan was that we identify a bunch of companies and undertake a comparative review of their homepages, using the form I had developed for the homepage review. We would rank them competitively and publicise the results in the media. Then we tell the companies that they could buy a full report detailing issues with their homepages, and recommendations for fixing them.
"Bingo – a successful usability service product!"After this we’ll try to up-sell them to the full site assessment or the enquiry analysis products we have previously devised. Hopefully.
So far, we’ve managed to get it to the media. You can see me do this on ASB Business, as broadcast on TV1, Monday 6 August. Just follow this link… http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411415/1273251 Look for the story headlined ‘Raising corporate awareness’.
Now we’ll start calling the businesses we’ve surveyed and try to get them interested in what they don’t know about how well their homepages are working for them. You can find out more from the Wired Internet group at www.wired.co.nz
We’ve also done a parallel exercise on the NZX Top 50, concentrating on investor relations. We’re launching this via the Stock Exchange itself, getting them to promote it as a free offering to their members – followed by a sales blitz. I’ll keep you posted.
Labels: business plan, information design, product, usability
posted by Bruce on Tuesday, August 14, 2007,
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What is an information designer?
13 August 2007 Bruce and I often get asked what an information designer is. We've had a few thoughts over some good coffee (Savoy Brown in Christchurch, if you must know), and here's our answer.First, for us, Information Design is the discipline dedicated to making information as effective as possible.
It is a careful balance of the disciplines of graphic design, information architecture, and writing, while embracing significant elements from research into human factors, cognitive psychology, and perception. It has grown out of all these fields, along with a historical connection to technical communication.
So what is an Information Designer?
An Information Designer is an advocate for the user in the design process. They try to think of how a user would work with and use something. They think of the user's context, where and how they will use something, and for what purpose. Their aim is to ensure that all information, regardless of media is 'optimally fit for use' in this way.
An info designer understands how to write in a way that communicates well, and how to explain complex ideas in simple and clear ways. They also know how good design makes things easy to use, easy to work with, and easy to understand.
How do you become an info designer?
There are many paths to becoming one, but that doesn't make an info designer a "jack-of-all-trades" even if they might seem that way. Similarly, don't assume an info designer is master of no trades, because most info designers often have hidden and unexpected talents from their past, experiences that they bring to the role in a symbiotic and beneficial way.
For this reason, there's no one way to become an info designer, but there are some character traits that distinguish one.
Info designers often have a liking for technical stuff and understanding how things work. They can probably program your video machine for you, or connect you to the RSS feed for the BBC News on the web.
They know ways to help make the complex understandable, and how to best communicate that through good typography, layout, and illustration. Planning, content management, and analysis are all strings in their box, and they know how to manage collaborative work processes to maximise how organisations create, manage and re-use information.
Info designers know your customer is the most important thing to you, and understand that communicating information is essential to your business, so they often have skills in marketing and promotions to add to the mix.
Of course all this personality is very nice, but you also need some skills, and there are a variety of training courses around the world available to "gear you up".
Why should you use one?
Aren't they just another body, an extra cost in the development/design process?
Good question. Everyone seems to want a finger in the pie/seat at the table these days, from the usability consultant to the knowledge management specialist. All seem to think they should rule the roost, and need to drive the project. Well, actually that's project management.
In fact, the info designer is a good choice for a design project manager, or at the least a key part of a design team, as they are able to realise the IP value of everybody in a design project, and use them to create something that is truly a gestalt - greater than the sum of the parts.
They do this because they are trained to recognise the expertise of all involved is necessary to produce effective information and communication products, and because they have an understanding of all the aforementioned disciplines.
They can also help manage relations with stakeholders inside and outside the organisation, to support the good work everyone is doing but perhaps not everyone knows about.
Sounds wondrous? Unreal, even. Not really. As the working world moves more and more into being knowledge-orientated, information design as a discipline and skill-set is becoming not just incredibly useful but also essential to economic and organisational success. If you don't communicate effectively, you lose.
Information designers are now working in every conceivable industry and field, not just the information technology and technical communication fields. Bruce and I are constantly surprised at the industries our students work in, or find work in, and considering the talent of many of them, it seems like the future may well be one where information is easier to use. We all know it needs to be!
Labels: information design
posted by Greg on Monday, August 13, 2007,
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Information design for the time poor
08 March 2007 Information design, or more specifically interface design, helps us time poor individuals survive in the modern world.
I realised this the other day I when showed my colleague Bruce the new Windows Media Player 11.For some time I'd not bothered too much with Media Player, because v. 9 drove me nuts for its poor usability (all those split windows reminded me of HTML framesets and they were just as horrible to use - urgh!) and doing stuff I didn't want. All the talk about problems with digital media rights put me off upgrading to v. 10, so I put up with v. 9 at work, but used other media players at home.
Recently someone at work showed me v. 11 and said they thought it was much improved. So I installed it and was surprised to find it was much better to use.
When I showed it to Bruce, he commented that it did look better, but did it show you a track list while running in compact mode? I'd forgotten that was how he preferred to use it, and sure enough, when we looked, v. 11 didn't either.
Thinking about this later, I realised I didn't know the answer to his question because:
- I used the interface differently than him, and
- I really wasn't aware of all the features in the software.
In part it is because there are so many features in software these days - compare Word 6 with Word 2003 for instance, but I think it is more than this.
I think software has now become part of the current information overload phenomena, in that not only does most software do more than we actually need or use, but we have so many types of software now. Software for creating documents (notice it's not word processing anymore), programs for creating and managing data, tools for storing, creating and editing images, things for organising us and our stuff, things for storing our stuff, and more. And the expectations on many of us in our work places and homes to be able to use these things is high.
Of course with these new fangled online office applications and storage facilities (Google, Zoho, ThinkFree, gOFFICE, and many more) we have a whole different way of working with these tools to deal with.
All these software tools are created by different people who have different ideas about interfaces and the way they should work.
I don't have time now to spend discovering all the intricacies in most of the information tools I use. I need to get something done right now, and so I discover as I go. To do this, I need things to be easy to use, to be intuitive, and possibly familiar to other things I've used.
Because of this emphasis on action and immediacy, there may well be features in many of the products and software I use, that I never use or discover. I'm told the new Office 2007 has few new features, but the interfaces for Word, Excel, etc have been completely re-designed, based on feedback that users keep requesting features that have existed for several versions. Obviously the interface was getting in the way of people finding the feature they wanted.
Good information design is often about being involved in many aspects of the design of something, but the key is being user-orientated. People today work and live in environments that are short on time and high on complexity. Provide a tool or information product that works the way the user will expect it to work, and you're likely to be on to a winner.
Labels: information design
posted by Greg on Thursday, March 08, 2007,
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“Former All Black, and prostitute”
23 February 2007 Copy-editing is so old skool, isn’t it? All that guff about proper grammar [not to mention spelling] – it’s out the window in today’s world, right?This seems to be the case with Radio NZ news these days [don’t even get me started about newspaper writing – English not a job requirement at our local rag]. In the last week I’ve heard several howlers that stopped me in my tracks – I fully expect to hear ‘piano for sale by old lady with carved legs’ before the week is out.
So what?
Well – what, actually. Emphatically what.
Clarity and correctness of expression is a benefit in any communication situation, especially in a media outlet professing to present ‘quality news’. This morning I heard the best one yet. A serving police-officer is on trial for something, the details aren’t relevant so I won’t bore you. Evidence has apparently been given on matters of fact by someone whose name I’ve forgotten, I’ll call him Joe Blow for the purposes of this rant.
A friend of the accused, Joe Blow, a former All Black, and a doctor, were called to give evidence.”In print, that word ‘were’ stands out clearly in a way it does not when spoken on the radio. The overall syntactical structure of the sentence suggests that the former All Black is a doctor. This was how I heard it until I was able to recall the use of the word ‘were’ rather than ‘was’, and I realised that two people had given evidence on the matter. Anyone ever heard the usability principle - ‘don’t make me think”? Please!
How many listeners using only half an ear think that Joe Blow is a doctor? Does it matter? - probably not: but only by sheer chance. What if that other witness was a prostitute? Or a prison inmate? If I was Joe Blow, I’d be calling my lawyer, and Radio NZ’s head of news would be wondering how much the omission of the word ‘both’ at the start of that sentence was going to cost his or her employers.
Information design isn’t just interactivity, flash graphics and extreme software skills – there’s a lot of old skool stuff that has to be nailed down as well. And if not all the team at work has those skills, you have to wonder if its not worthwhile employing someone who can at least sometimes act as a sub-editor?
And prostitute.
Labels: information design
posted by Bruce on Friday, February 23, 2007,
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