When you need to get a User’s Guide or a Help system ready for your product there’s a great temptation to start writing straight away. It’s often the case that creating the user documentation has been left to quite a late stage in the product development cycle anyway, so everything is in a rush. It’s difficult for everyone concerned, particularly the technical writers. There is a better way.
The key to creating effective technical communication is understanding the user audience, and understanding the tasks they need to perform. The earlier you can start thinking about the audience – and ideally meeting them as well – the better. The more you know about the people using your product and about their information needs the easier it is to meet those needs with documentation that gets read. Once you fully understand your audience’s point of view – or the points of view of all your different audiences – explaining the technology in ways that are useful and meaningful becomes easy.
Planning ahead and designing your information can also offer opportunities for more efficient document development methods, such as single sourcing and content re-use, and adopting a standards-based approach.
Well designed information may be hard to describe but it’s easy to recognise. Perhaps you recently bought a sophisticated piece of technological equipment, such as a DVD recorder. It’s possible that the recorder came with a detailed user manual and that although you tried your best you couldn’t make head or tail of it. You just wanted to record a programme and you didn’t have the patience to wade through a lot of irrelevant technical jargon. You can’t use the recorder properly because you haven’t been able to learn what to do from themanufacturer’s manual. That manual is an example of poorly designed information – it didn’t take account of you, the end-user, or of what you wanted to do, or how and when you wanted to do it.
On the other hand, perhaps the DVD recorder came with a Quick Reference Card. On one side it showed you how to record a programme in three or four steps, and on the other side it showed you how to pla back something you’d recorded. That’s exactly what you needed – nothing more, nothing less. That’s an example of well designed information.
Information design is an all-embracing approach to more effective communication. It brings together strands from many disciplines including graphic design, typography, cognitive psychology, linguistics and ergonomics, as well as writing and rhetoric. Information design can apply to much more than product documentation, for example the design of utility bills, product labelling, medicine package inserts, signage inside buildings and on the streets, and much more.
In the world of software systems, the term information architecture is often used to describe ways of providing better information systems by refining the electronic data processing systems that record, store, manipulate or generate information. Information design has very little to do with electronic systems themselves, but may make use of a range of electronic techniques to deliver information to users. Delivering complex systems of user information, for example delivering multiple versions of documents in multiple formats and languages requires extensive planning and design, and is sometimes also referred to as information architecture.
Information design is a task-based and user-centric approach for technical communication which focuses on user needs and user outcomes rather than on product development. Effective documentation helps people achieve their goals, in the same way that effective airport signage helps people catch their flights. Please contact me to discuss how an information design approach could make your company’s documentation more effective.
If you’d like to learn more about information design you can read this article by Sue Walker and Mark Barratt (link to external site, opens in new window).
