Knowledge Work

The information architecture group blog Boxes and Arrows has a great post this week on the basic kinds of information-seeking behaviors by users of a web or intranet site, and how to design for maximum information retrievability.

Most information architects already take “known item” (you know what you’re looking for) and “exploratory” (browsing) searching into account in their site designs. 

Donna Maurer adds two new search types - “don’t know what you need to know” and “re-finding,” and provides some helpful design tips and thoughts.

Four modes of seeking information and how to design for them (Boxes and Arrows)

Here’s a classic example of why you need writers and editors who understand the subject matter they’re writing about:

After almost 20 years languishing on the shelf, large companies are beginning to adopt ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library of IT services best practices guidelines (the British pronounce it “it-ill,” while Americans say “eye-till”). Forrester Research predicts that 40 percent of large organizations will rely on ITIL by 2006 and 80 percent by 2008, up from a mere 13 percent that had implemented it by 2004.

[Ed. note: Hand-waving and hype about the future numbers, which are anybody’s guess, and there are plenty of people in Europe who would point out that ITIL has hardly been “languishing on the shelf for 20 years,” but probably more accurate than not. So far, so mediocre.]

Addressing ITIL and related IT management frameworks COBIT and ISO, a recent Forrester report notes…

Bzzzzzz! Wrong. “ISO” stands for “International Standards Organization,” and you don’t even want to think about how many numbered ISO standards there are, more than 99% of which have nothing whatsoever to do with IT service management. “ISO,” to put it mildly, ain’t a management framework.

Such a little thing.

Such a massively important thing–if you’re trying to sell somebody on the idea that you know what you’re talking about, you just blew it.

I know that Forrester Research has better writers and editors than this, so I’m pretty sure that somebody over at “Intelligent Enterprise” dropped the ball here.

The writer, by the way, most likely intended to reference ISO 9000 (quality management) or, if exceptionally hip, ISO 20000 (IT service management) though there are other possibilities as well.

Governance Gauge: Don’t Worry, “ITIL” Be Alright [sic] (Intelligent Enterprise.com)

Today I want to talk about the all-out assault on the English language and the role technology plays in that unprovoked and dastardly attack. I especially want to talk about the ways dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo.Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, “Well, at least people are writing again.” Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.

[…]

Business jargon is simply the art of saying nothing while appearing to say a lot.

As a result, we have CEOs of major corporations who lack the basic writing skills to pen a simple, in-house memo in plain-spoken English. We see marketing swine get paid princely sums to lie about their products in language so bloated with jargon that their lies — and even their half-truths — are unintelligible. We see company flacks churning out impenetrable press releases that no editor in his right mind would consider reading, let alone using. We see business reporting reduced to the trite and formulaic because the reporter is either too uncritical or too lazy to take a hard look at what lies behind the smoke and mirrors.

Wired News: Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone

The most critical aspect of user-centered design, usability testing breaks down the wall between the designer and user, and allows us to see how real users do real tasks in the real world. There are many benefits of usability testing, including uncovering pitfalls in a current system before a redesign and evaluating the usability of a system during and after design. Usability testing should be an iterative practice, completed several times during the design and development life-cycle. The end result is an improved product and a better understanding of the users that we’re designing for.

Digital Web Magazine - Practical Usability Testing

Not too long ago, a senior manager asked me to write a short page of talking points explaining why it was a good idea to have professional communicators–in this case, technical communicators–on staff.  Here’s what I came up with. Maybe you can use it too (or refine it–comments are welcome!)

• Research, write, edit and refine technical and marketing documentation, either as lead authors or as team participants.
• Policy and procedure manuals
• Proposals and RFPs
• Training materials
• Web pages
• Product manuals and online help
• White papers
• Reports and presentations
• Project documentation
• Research and recommend best practices for communications.
• Set and propagate documentation standards and style guidelines.
• Manage your documentation library and collaboration tools.

Why should you care?

An experienced technical communicator can help you save money, make money, establish and maintain a competitive advantage, and comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

Save money

• Reduce support and overhead costs by delivering improved training material and reference documents.
• Increase buy-in from colleagues and clients by delivering persuasive and easy-to-understand policy and procedure documentation.
• Help your staff “do it right the first time” by providing clear directions, reducing the necessity for costly rework and revision due to ambiguity and misunderstanding.
• Bring new employees and client staff up to speed quickly by providing clear documentation and training material; they will become more productive, faster.

Make money

• Win new business by crafting more compelling proposals and RFPs.
• Add considerable value to the services that you deliver and the processes and tools that you support by being able to offer high-quality training and documentation and turning it into a selling point.

Establish and maintain a competitive advantage

• Clear communication helps you align business and IT goals and practices to improve your organization’s effectiveness.

Comply with legal and regulatory requirements

• Stay out of the liability zone by clearly documenting your policies and procedures and communicating them to clients and staff.
• Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and related global and industry-specific statutory requirements.

Hiding confidential information with black marks works on printed copy, but not with electronic documents, the National Security Agency has warned government officials.

The agency makes the point in a guidance paper on editing documents for release, published last month following several embarrassing incidents in which sensitive data was unintentionally included in computer documents and exposed. The 13-page paper is called: “Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF.”

Instead of covering up digital text with black boxes, it is better to delete any information you don’t want to share, the NSA suggested.

Editing tips from the NSA: CNET News.com

Update: On the TECHWR-L mailing list, user Sue Gallagher points us to a very useful redaction tool for users of Microsoft Word 2003:

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Microsoft Word 2003 Redaction Add-In

Here’s a good overview of how to avoid some all-too-common mistakes when constructing a PowerPoint presentation: 8 mistakes when creating PowerPoint presentations (SympleByte.)

I have long been a fan of O’Reilly Media’s technical books, and a happy subscriber to “Safari Bookshelf,” their online library; in its most basic form, for about $10 a month the Safari plan entitles you to read up to five O’Reilly books on-screen at the same time. It’s a tremendous bargain and value.

Safari is about to get a lot more interesting. O’Reilly has just announced “Rough Cuts,” a way to gain access to very early editions of books on emerging technologies as they are being developed.

Safari Books Online is pleased to announce the launch of the new Rough Cuts service. Rough Cuts gives you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies — before it’s published. It lets you literally read the book as it is being written.

The four inaugural Rough Cuts titles come from O’Reilly Media and share our focus on hot emerging technologies: Ajax Hacks, Flickr Hacks, Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, and Ruby Cookbook. In February, O’Reilly will follow up with Ubuntu Hacks, Ajax Design Patterns, and Perl Hacks. The Pearson Technology Group will join the Rough Cuts service later this quarter with: Macs on the Go, Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2, Secrets of Videoblogging, Imagination Challenge and ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed.

This is a great idea and should prove to be an interesting experiment; O’Reilly has consistently found ways to remain relevant as a print publisher in an increasingly Web-based world, and this idea shows a lot of promise.

Socrates. He would be a very simple person… who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Phaedrus. That is most true.

Socrates. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.

(Plato, Phaedrus - translated by B. Jowett)

If you ever have to teach anyone anything–as part of your job, on a volunteer basis, for any reason at all–or if you ever give presentations, or write user documentation, you could do worse than spend fifteen minutes with this blog post:

…[H]ere’s a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design). Much of it is based around courses I designed and taught at UCLA Extension’s New Media/Entertainment Studies department…

This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it’s geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning–you can easily adapt it to presentations, user documentation, or classroom learning.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory

Related:

• Crash Course in Learning - Summary
• (Summary PDF file - 500K)