Yet again, a post by Garr Reynolds has made me wonder about how his advice about presenting crosses over into the world of technical authoring.
Garr’s latest post is about Dr. John Medina’s book “Brain Rules“, which has 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home and school. He’s also created a slideshow about the book:
Here are my initial thoughts on how some of the rules affect technical authors:
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things
Medina states multi-tasking is myth. We need to dedicate our attention to one thing at a time. In this situation, a paper manual scores, as we can read it in a peaceful and distraction free envionment. That’s a lot harder to do with on-screen information, with email notifications and other “noise” vying for our attention.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
Do we expect users of user manuals, and Help files in particular, to remember what is contained within them? Are they there simply to be followed and then forgotten?
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
Technical manuals probably don’t contain enough images. This may be because they are hard to maintain, authors are wordsmiths rather than graphics designers, and they take time to do. Writers of Help files avoid using screenshots to avoid users confusing the Help file with the application itself. However, given the effectiveness of visuals, perhaps they should include more?
What do you think?
As you say, including graphics in a document is a definite skill (I’m talking infographics here, rather than blindly dumping screenshots into every step).
For Online Help, we used to ‘rip’ images, using a separate image of a ripped paper edge in a layer in Photoshop, to make it obvious that it wasn’t an active window. Seemed to work.