Following on from James Mathewson’s presentation at Content Strategy 17, we’ve been reflecting on Cherryleaf’s main website, and the improvements we could make to it. One thing we have started to do is reduce the reading age for the content. Reading age measures are also, in effect, readability measures. So any improvements also benefit people… Read more »
Category: usability
How old are your readers?
In his newsletter last week, internet psychologist Graham Jones mentioned research that had looked into what makes some web content more shareable than others. The researchers had analysed articles on Medium, and found there were several key factors. One was the length of the content – around 1,800 words ( approximately 7 minutes reading time). Another was… Read more »
Customer Journey Mapping and technical communication
A technical communicator’s lot is usually to create content for helping users, and, if they are lucky, do some user testing of it in order to make future improvements. It is not that common for them to be able to look at the bigger picture and think about how the user gets to that information… Read more »
Common sense isn’t always common
Here’s some examples from Munich of what might seem to obvious and common sense to the one audience, but not to others. Traffic lights that have four lights, with the symbols –, O, I and K: Pedestrian crossing lights that have two people instead of one: The second set of lights is still comprehendible (hold… Read more »
Content as an API – Mozilla Developer Network
Mozilla is an organisation that always seems to be doing innovative things with their documentation. One of the experimental functions it has introduced to its Kuma wiki platform for the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) documentation is an experimental PUT API that makes it possible to create and update articles remotely. Mozilla suggests a number of ways it can be… Read more »