| WHY
would I want to change my thinking to accommodate electronic documents? Mainly because adding hypertext links and bookmark, annotation, and search capabilities alone doesn't take full advantage of the medium. Adding these features is like adding a motor to a surrey and calling it a car. It's a start, but only a start. In order to take better advantage of electronic media we need to recognize the inherent differences between paper and the current forms of electronic delivery; then use our imagination.
OUR TRAINING in writing and documenting is based on an age-old assumption that the medium of delivery is paper. Thus we were taught to organize in outline format: higher to lower, general to detail, front to back. The document was something we held in our hands and examined from without by turning pages or searched by using tables of contents and indexes. ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS are presented in a window that we usually don't touch and can't easily page through. We usually have no idea of the size of the document or how it is structured. With context-sensitive help and many web sites, we often enter the document at some point other than the beginning. Too often we don't know where we are or where we're going in the document. Our expectations of electronic documents are also somewhat different than they are for paper documents. Most significant, I think, is that with electronic documents we expect to find specific information quickly. Most of us are far more tolerant when it comes to searching paper documents than we are when searching electronic documents. After four years of developing online help software manuals and trying to address these differences, I realized that gradually I had changed my thinking. I now picture myself within the document instead of without. This puts me in the place of the user, who for practical purposes is immersed in the document (as if in an unfamiliar landscape) and at our mercy for guidance.
TO COMPLETE THE ANALOGY, time (or space, or the ocean, or the landscape) is the document, our work area and computer are the vessel and its cockpit, and the software interface provides the windows, devices, and controls. The software interface and the document we create need to complement each other in such a way that our users have clear, direct access to the information they are seeking, and are afforded a clear understanding of where they are and how they can go elsewhere without losing their bearings. AN EXAMPLE of this approach is the design of an electronic travel guide. Instead of chapters in a paper book, we have locations (for example: Boston, Framingham, Roxbury) that serve as information centers. For each such center, the display provides direct access to information about that center: travel oriented establishment (food, lodging, points of interest), emergency information (police, hospitals), demographics, businesses, schools, and so forth. We also include quick access to information for orientation purposes, such as maps and lists of nearby towns in all directions, and provide navigational devices (buttons, arrows, icons) that take us to other centers. All these categories of information and types of controls are at our fingertips, as they would be in our vessel's cockpit. This leads to an essential concept:
(We don't actually discard what we learned with paper - hierarchies and so forth - we just subdue it, make it less dominant. Hierarchies, for example, are still necessary, but often at a lower or less important level.) With proper organization and layout, we can provide the electronic document user with direct access, or at least unambiguous near-direct access, to all information considered important to that center; and a clear understanding of where else to look and how to get there. The mechanisms at our disposal are all the functions provided by our authoring software: buttons, pop-up windows, lists of hot-links, and so forth. THE KEY to achieving a successful electronic document is not so much adding functionality to traditional forms of documents, or developing a formulaic or empirical approach through experience with similar documents, as it is imagining ourselves within the document and addressing the issues from that vantage point. I call it thinking from within the box, as in Calvin's cardboard box.
This is the first in a series of four articles. A variation of this article was published in the Nov/Dec 1998 issue of Boston Broadside, newsletter of the Boston Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. |
IMAGINE yourself in a car, a submarine, a space ship. Imagine yourself in Calvin's cardboard box-turned-time-machine, spanning the ages on an exploratory mission. If Calvin had taken the time to focus on the mundane details of his vessel, as we tech writers must do, he most likely would have found his vessel equipped with windows for visual observation and orientation, instruments and readout devices for gathering and displaying data, and controls with which to navigate the vessel and adjust his view of the data. As he moved through time, the displays and data would have changed to fit the circumstances, but the various windows and devices would have remained the same.