When Kath Straub gave her presentation on Reading beyond the words: How text formatting can enhance the readability and persuasiveness of text at the Technical Communications UK 2009 (TCUK09) Conference she created an unexpected storm. That’s probably because what Kath was saying about a very specific meaning of “text formatting” seemed to be contradicting the current dominant trends in the technical publications field. But I for one was very glad to have heard her presentation as I think I learned a great deal from it. Read more
Tag usabilty
How did they design Office 2007?
I have just read a fascinating interview with one of the people responsible for designing the ribbon interface of Office 2007. (Thanks to Peter Bogaards of InfoDesign – Understanding by design for providing the link – Peter always recommends excellent material.) I know a large number of technical writers who are heavy-duty users of Microsoft Word, and the ribbon interface was one of the new features of Word 2007 that many technical writers of my acquaintance did not like at all when it was first launched. A common early reaction was something like: “just when we got used to where all the commands were in Word 2003, Microsoft went and changed everything again!” Opinions of Word 2007 have mellowed somewhat over the last year or so, as professional technical writers have got used to the new interface, and developed efficient ways of working with it.
The interview itself is by Dan Harrelson of Adaptive Path, and in it he speaks to Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Office User Experience team. The first thing that is clear from what Jensen says is that the heavy-duty professional Word user was never a focus of the Microsoft Office development effort. In fact, Harris says, it was ordinary users who were central to their thinking: “…we wanted normal people to be able to make beautiful, stunning documents and presentations. We wanted the average user to have access to professional-level results with fewer steps than in the past.” Harris goes on to extol the virtues of being able to “beautify” a picture in your document with “great-looking designs”, which you can now do with Office 2007’s graphics engine. This type of aesthetic question is not usually uppermost in the minds of most professional technical writers. We are more interested in mundane stuff, like consistent application of formatting styles, paragraph or heading numbering that doesn’t have a mind of its own, pagination that stays put, indexing, cross-referencing, tables of contents, and so on. In fact, most professional writers are really most concerned with getting the content right – making sure that the words themselves are accurate, concise, appropriate, effective – so even the word processing features we are interested in are actually a distraction for us. That may be why some technical writers get so annoyed when Word does unexpected things.
The most fascinating feature of the interview is the description Harris getting developers to observe usability tests.
“When you want to convince a developer to help you make a change to the product, nothing is as compelling as bringing the developer into the lab and having them watch people fail. (Video also works well if you can’t bring the developer to the lab.)
Putting a human face on a failure really drives home why it’s important to improve usability, and helps everyone to visualize concretely whom we’re building the software for. Any developer worth her weight wants to do the right thing for her users, and so you usually just need to show them a test or two, and you’ll find that they are much more willing to help you. We bring developers and testers into our user research labs as frequently as possible.“
This is good to know, for several reasons. It’s good to know that Microsoft use usability testing, and takes note of user research findings. It’s even better to know that in this team at least, developers were engaged with the testing process. Telling companies reluctant to undertake usability testing that “this is what Microsoft do” may have a positive effect.
But it’s also clear that Microsoft did not have heavy-duty users in mind when it developed Office 2007, which is why, in its standard “out-of-the-box” implementation, Word 2007 is still not the best choice for large scale technical publications.
Where’s that command gone?
I have been using Microsoft Word professionally for quite a long time – since Word 2 on Windows 3, if you want to get historical about it. Each time Microsoft have presented a major upgrade I’ve got a little annoyed – sometimes more than a little – because they keep moving the commands. Just when you get used to finding something on particular menu, they go right ahead and bring out a new version, and – where’s that command gone again?
Microsoft Office 2007 brought in a huge redesign of the user interface, and there’s been a lot of criticism because of it. People just don’t like change. Worse still, from Microsoft’s point of view, is that organisations and individuals have been slow to upgrade to this new version, because it looks and feels so different from its predecessors. I myself am still sitting on the fence, with Office 2003 on my desktop machine where I do most of my work, and Office 2007 on my laptop.
There is a lot of help available if you want to (or have to) make the transition from Office 2003 to Office 2007 – much of it on the Microsoft Office Online web site. One item that’s particularly useful for Word users is an interactive tool that maps Word 2003 commands to their Word 2007 equivalents. (While you wait for it to load you might like to reflect on the irony that this tool has been built with Adobe Flash.)
I’m trying to share my knowledge and expertise as widely as I can, and because of this I’ve recently started a Microsoft Word Users Club on Ecademy, which is a social networking website for business and self-employed people. Ecademy is more than just an online network as there are regular real-life Ecademy meetings all over Britain and in many other countries as well. This new Ecademy group isn’t in competition with the existing Word user lists and forums, it’s just an extra way of spreading some useful information.
Reading by numbers
I am indebted to Karen Schriver, author of Dynamics in Document Design, for posting a note to the Info-Design Cafe mailing list about a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about readability formulas.
In his article “Can you read as well as a fifth-grader? Check the formula” columnist Carl Bialik discusses the readability formulas included in word processing software such as Microsoft Word, and discusses the value of the mechanical application of such formulas. He has opinions from both supporters and detractors of readability formulas, and counts both Karen Schriver, and Professor J. Peter Kincaid, one of the original instigators of the Flesch-Kincaid formula used in Microsoft Word, amongst those who question the value of the formulas.
I recently read a far more sustained attack on readability formulas, and in particular on their “dubious use” by the UK’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES), written by Martin Cutts of the Plain Language Commission. In Writing by numbers: are readability formulas to clarity what karaoke is to song? Cutts complains that public bodies like the DfES use readability formulas as part of their propaganda and ignore the obvious shortcomings of what he terms “crude” tests. He notes that the main problem with readability tests is that:
[those] who apply them uncritically tend to assume that any 10-sentence [passage] with, say, 12 polysyllabic words is as good and clear as any other with 12 polysyllabic words. But its grammar and punctuation may be poor and its message muddled, ambiguous or misleading. Such findings are only likely to emerge after usability testing (not readability testing) or editorial scrutiny or both.
In an effort to offer an alternative to the flawed readability formulas, Cutts and the Plain Language Commission have published a Plain English Lexicon, available free of charge for download from their website. The lexicon helps you find out whether the words you write will be easily understood, by comparing their grade level in the US Living Word Vocabulary (LWV) and their frequency in the UK British National Corpus (BNC). Words that have low LWV grade levels and high BNC frequencies should be easily understood by readers on both side of the Atlantic, according to Cutts. As long as the spelling isn’t too different over there.
Usability from the trenches
Mark Liberman is a linguist and mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also has some responsibilities for student accommodation.
He has written a wonderful article about an example of poor usability for a new computer application which was supposed to let students report facilities problems – leaky pipes, blocked drains, or burnt-out light-bulbs – to the facilities management service.
In “When bad interaction happens to good people” on his Language Log blog, Liberman describes what was wrong with the new software and the innovative way in which he addressed the issue – he wrote an “underground guide” in the style of a guide to a computer game!
This story elegantly highlights what tech writers and usability consultants have been trying to say for years: make user tasks the focus of user interactions with systems. Don’t make people struggle guess what the system wants them to do, instead create the system – or at least its UI – so that it anticipates what the users needs are.
