Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
September/October 2003

Meeting Report: July 2003

by Nan Breedlove
EBSTC Secretary

Designing for People! Human Factors for Technical Communicators

While taxing memory and challenging problem-solving skills, Andrea Ames impressed those attending the July 10 EBSTC meeting with the necessity to consider how users really solve problems in her presentation "Designing for People! Human Factors for Technical Communicators."

Ames, an Associate Fellow and First Vice President of STC, is a Senior Information Developer for IBM and Certificate Coordinator and Instructor at UC Extension (Santa Cruz).

She engaged listeners immediately by reciting a random list of words with mnemonic phrases and saying that later in the presentation she would ask them to recall the words.

Ames focused on two aspects of cognitive psychology that affect the ability to read, understand, and apply information:

• Memory

• Problem-solving technique

Headhunting in Borneo

Despite the technical communicator’s skill and best intentions, user perception based on experience or expectations can derail meaning from the outset before memory or problem-solving skills enter the picture.

Ames illustrated the point with the tale of the adventurer who hired a professional guide for a trek through the jungles of Borneo, an area notorious for headhunters. Encountering a spear-carrying native with his dog bearing down on them, the guide suddenly ran behind the adventurer and cowered, and the adventurer was terrified that he was about to lose his head. When the hunter and his dog passed by without incident, the adventurer berated the guide for not protecting him against the fierce hunter. The guide replied that the hunter was no threat, but that he feared that the dog would rip him to shreds.

Based on their experience with products and documentation, users have certain expectations that technical communicators may ignore at the peril of losing their readers. Usability testing provides an excellent opportunity to observe how experience and expectation affect the ability to absorb data and use it to complete a task.

Making Order Out of Chaos

Ames’s word list exercises dramatically demonstrated how the mind works to recall information. Listeners most readily remembered lists in which random words fell into associative groups. Likewise people had success remembering words when Ames provided the mnemonics. Success was most limited with a random list of words having no apparent associations. However, members of the audience reported trying to make some sort of order out of the random list to help them remember the words.

That exercise demonstrated that technical communicators must:

• Organize and categorize information for users

• Make navigation and next actions evident

• Provide a paradigm model for users to hang their hat on

• Be rigorously consistent with terminology

• Provide all necessary information or users will invent it

Can’t Get No Satisficing

Many communicators believe that to solve problems, people generally use the classic strategy of conceptualizing, reasoning, selecting a strategy, and avoiding obstacles. But the reality is that they resort to what has worked in the past to come up with a solution that "satisfices." That is, they use the first solution that occurs to them; it may not be elegant, but it satisfies because it suffices to get the job done.

There’s at least one engineer in every company who has a t-shirt that says, "Real men don’t read the manual." Ames encourages writers to use techniques that enable the user to skim and scan rather than read—because that’s how real people with real problems in real time look for answers.

If you feel like solving one of the problems presented, consider this: How many cubic feet of dirt can be removed from a hole 25 feet long by 10 feet wide by 5 feet deep? Answer

Resources

• Slides from Andrea’s presentation.

• Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think. Editor’s note: See the review of this book in this issue.

• Coe, Marlana. Human Factors for Technical Communicators

• Norman, Donald. The Psychology of Everyday Things

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