How many technical authors know about Mooer's Law?
In 1959, Calvin Mooers, a researcher into the science of Information Retrieval, developed Mooer's Law:
"An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it."
Its original meaning meant: people will avoid an information system because it gives them information which is painful and troublesome to possess.
However, Mooer's Law was reinterpreted by Roger Summit and others as meaning: "information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain".
According to the latest edition of E&T magazine, a study by the Centre for Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at UCL for the British Library noticed readers are now "power browsing" (i.e skimming or scanning) online content.
"It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense".
One of the common practises in technical communication and user assistance is to publish "deep learning" content on paper, rather than online. This research would seem to back this up.
However, the research does note a concern: people may be getting out of the habit of deep reading, as a consequence of reading most of the time from a screen.
If this is true, then this would cause problems not only in the for academic research field, but also in the user assistance/technical communication field too.
Should we worry about this?
What should we do?
Labels: technical authors, technical communication
posted by Ellis @ 10:31 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Are people getting out of the habit of deep reading? You bet. Especially as mobile devices work there way further into our daily lives. Can't do much deep reading on a iPhone right?
As such, it's on technical communicators to figure out how to connect with the audience in this new landscape. Just as people only scan on web pages, as Jakob Nielsen has shown many times, people will only scan on mobile devices as well.
Knowing this, authors/communicators have to come up with new ways to engage their audience and help them find the information they need.
Also known as "scanners", most busy people will skip through a document, reading only the headlines and start of each paragraph.
Personally, i find that I'm using the various search facilities before starting on the bulk reading these days... So, one solution might be to include a comprehensive index and metadata that will make searching the written article easier and more effective.
BTW: When I first scanned this headline, I though it might be a mis-spelling of "Moore's Law" :-)
I agree with Christopher, We need to use the wonderful search and online facilities that modern users ("skimmers") like so much to draw them in to more complex information by persuading them that there is something worth knowing in there up front (super abstracts :-) ). People don't trust that they want to put in the effort to read a large or bulky item, so it's up to us to convince them and to deliver it to them in a convenient manner.
Having said that, it is my opinion that we do not use multi-media materials enough to communicate difficult information (we tend to over use multimedia for simple info where we don't need it, and default to text as soon as anything gets tricky).
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