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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".
>
>--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
>geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
>
>"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
>
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