Surveying the customer? (was Numbered headings)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Bevan Mccabe reports: <<A couple of these posters have mentioned surveying
your customers about numbered headings or fonts. I think this misses the
point of surveying. Such formatting-type questions are frivolous; a lot of
customers would skip these questions, and are a matter of opinion which
you're likely to get inconclusive results from in
any case.>>

Although you're correct that formatting questions are generally far less
important than knowledge-related and usability questions, you shouldn't
ignore such issues if you have time to do the research. Don't forget that
you don't always need to actually survey the customers; sometimes all you
need do is pick up a few standard references for that field. (For example,
if you're writing proposals or preparing manuscripts for peer-reviewed
journals, the client's guidelines will tell you exactly what their
requirements are.) In some fields, such as legal writing and military
documentation, the numbered headings are very important to readers, and
unilaterally deciding to eliminate numbering can end up decreasing
usability. I agree with the viewpoint that sometimes the user's expectations
are simply inefficient, and that we should make an effort to convert them to
something more efficient, but in practice, I don't know of any universally
applicable way to do this without causing more problems than we solve.

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