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Monica Leggoe is <<...conducting research on principles for choosing the
size, shape, binding, and outer appearance of manuals, documentation, and
user's guides but, surprisingly, is having difficulty coming up with any
research or guidelines on the topic. Can anyone suggest any books, articles,
or websites that she might look at to give her some help with the topic. I'm
frankly surprised I haven't been able to come up with anything for her...
There are several issues to consider here. First, there's the _graphic_
design issue, for which there are a raft of good books available. I
personally don't recommend Robin Williams (personal taste, plus I find she
lacks a grounding in cognitive psych and information design), but Roger
Parker's done marvelous stuff. And if you've got a big budget, the often
erratically published newsletter "Before and After" (John McWade) is
probably the best resource in existence for understanding how people
perceive design, and how you develop a design based on those perceptions.
John is an excellent graphic designer, but he also understands the user's
perspective (something I find lacking in Williams' books).
Second, there's the _information_ design issue. I generally recommend Karen
Schriver's "Dynamics in Document Design" for anyone who needs to understand
the cognitive principles behind how people use information. Best of all,
there's a huge bibliography that can get you started on finding other
articles. (One of my favorite search tips for literature reviews: find one
good article, and see who that author cited. Find a good article by each of
the cited authors (or find many, if the author is working on precisely what
you need to research), and see who _they_ cited. And so on. This approach
leverages the effort the original author did in searching the literature,
and progressively leverages each additional author's work.) If you're doing
a keyword search, try "contextual inquiry", since documentation is more than
the sum of its parts: you need to address a raft of issues (from typography
to reproduction quality) to make documentation effective. You also need to
determine the "size, shape, binding, and outer appearance" for any new
project, since all of these factors depend more on the needs of your actual
audience than on abstract design principles. Contextual inquiry tells you
how people actually use your documentation, and you can't design something
appropriate until you know that. Speaking of which:
Third, there's the whole issue of "convention". For most situations,
sticking with the "standard" works just fine, and for documentation, that
standard tends to be 7x9 inches (plus or minus a bit); this works well
because it's large enough to use graphics effectively, but small enough to
fit even on a moderately crowded desk beside a computer. There may be
theoretical advantages to picking a different size, but as in studies of
typography, "proving" that one design is statistically better than another
may produce no increase in usability if the difference isn't also
significant in practical terms. That being said, sometimes it really does
pay to pick a format that's different from your standard. When I worked for
a government forestry research institute, virtually all of our publications
were standard North American 8.5x11 paper because we were designing for
people (largely government and university researchers) who would be reading
the reports at a desk or in an armchair (not at a computer), and we used
only black ink and relatively inexpensive recycled paper to keep costs low.
But we also published a guide to determining the state of maturity of jack
pine seed cones that would be used in the field. To make it useful, we
measured most of the jackets used by field researchers in our building (who
were very representative of our target audience) to find a book size that
would fit in a typical jacket pocket. We chose to use full color because
many of the differences we were illustrating could not have been seen in
black and white, and we used glossy, heavy, coated stock so the photos would
be clear and so that the book would survive a brief rain shower in the
field. We won an award for the results. So, convention notwithstanding, the
rule of thumb is "different needs, different solutions".
"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer
