Human Factors for Technical Communicators
Book
Ends Debates About the Details
Review by
Christine Abbott
By
Marlana
Coe
Wiley Computer Publishing
As technical
writers we live in the details. Debates over the color for a "Caution"
graphic can go on for weeks. In Human Factors for Technical Communicators,
Marlana Coe dares to put an end to these debates with well-researched
facts.
Coe lays
it all out at the beginning—this book is not a how to-but deals with
the theory of designing "truly user-centered" technical communications.
She accomplishes this through the use of illustrations, heaps of examples,
and a sensitivity for the concerns that surround the design of usable
technical communications.
The first half of the book explains the basic fundamentals of cognitive psychology. You are taken through:
- sensation and perception
- learning
- memory
- problem solving
In Chapter Six, "Accessing Information," how text is read (or, as Coe put it, "taking in sensory data and a cognitive process of understanding that data") is discussed. How the eye processes text is illustrated. She describes the following seven-step process of reading.
- Perceive visual data.
- Recognize words and letters, and learn new words.
- Understand the relationship of individual words to the whole passage.
- Relate the information to a body of knowledge.
- Encode the information.
- Retrieve the information.
- Communicate the information.
It was enlightening to realize that, in order to perform the step "Click OK," the reader had to first take seven steps just to understand how to proceed. Now you know why there is the no-more-than-seven-steps-in-a-procedure rule.
In Chapter
Eight, Coe brings up a common issue. "Too often, technical communicators
accept second- or third-hand information about their users," she
says and offers counter strategies. Some are generally considered, such
as sitting in on customer-support calls, user groups, and site visits,
while others are a systematic approach to building user partnerships.
These
are:
- competitive benchmarking
- brainstorming
- mind mapping
- storyboarding
- paperwalks
- draft and prototype reviews
- usability testing
After you
have taken the seven steps to reading on every page, you are left wanting
more. Where do you go next? There is no "human factors for technical
communicators." Part Deux, ah, therein lies the rub. Coe makes
good on her statement that this book is ". . . a kick in the pants
to get you started thinking about a human-factors approach to designing
and developing written technical communication."
Whether you use Human Factors for Technical Communicators as a reference (the appendix is excellent resource for cultural associations) or as a jump-start, it belongs on your shelf. It is now in a position of honor on my shelf right next to JoAnn Hackos' Managing Documentation Projects. You can buy this used for under $30 on Amazon.com.
The latest on the Web is that, after a 30-year consulting career, Marlana Coe has dissolved Coe Communications, Inc., and taken a position with the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles.
