Chris Edwards has written an article on product design in the E&T magazine called “The art of avoiding lemons“, in which he looks at whether there is more to product design than simply getting your design to look good or your product to work. He shows there are many situations where brilliantly designed products still… Read more »
Tag: usability
Attention Economics
The various discussions concerning the future of the Society of Technical Communication reminded me of the concept of Attention Economics and Attention as a product. Herbert Simon wrote in the 1970s: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What… Read more »
Which model of communication will technical communicators employ in the future?
About 44 minutes into his presentation, Michael Wesch talked about network size and the effect it traditionally has on the ways teachers communicate information to students. He said as the audience size increases, teachers have found they’ve had to get their students to participate less and follow more. He argued educators should and could move back to… Read more »
Why bother with end user documentation for Web Applications?
In Rahel Bailie’s excellent presentation at the STC Conference (“The New Face of Documentation“), she looked at the “No Documentation” approach to software user assistance. This, she summed up, as the “we don’t document it; we just fix it” view of software development. She argued that a “No Documentation” approach doesn’t lead to no documentation. Users soon… Read more »
What should you include in your user documentation?
Technical authors are faced with limited time and resources, so they often are faced with the dilemma as to what to include and what to leave out of their user documentation. You may ask, if 80% read only 20% of the content, is there any value in documenting the rest? Technical Authors are often great… Read more »