The Software User Assistance 2009 conference in Seattle explored deeply how the entire field is changing and how our deliverables and methods can and must change.
Tony Self, in his presentation "What if the reader can't read?", sounded the alarm about changes in our users. Beyond the worsening literacy of the emerging workforce, the general increase in reader impatience is dooming traditional documentation. The Akami study (2006) showed that 75% of people would not go back to a site that took more than 4 seconds to load, where only a few years earlier it was 8 seconds. Given that 4 seconds is about 15 words read, it doesn't bode well for textual deliverables. Other studies show that web reading not only degrades our ability to read thoroughly, but it changes how we think and consume information. Increasingly, we're power browsers, not readers. What to do? Given our readers' move towards skimming information horizontally, reading snippets of text from different sources rather than in-depth, vertical reading, we need to change what we deliver.
- Essential changes: [1] do standalone, topic-based authoring, [2] edit down the text (say it in 15 words!), [3] single-source aggressively, [4] slash production time.
- Radical changes: [1] abandon the TOC (no one reads top-down), [2] abandon task help (conceptual only), [3] move to non-textual communication: graphics, videos, animation, [4] support collaboration (users prefer peers to manuals, see wikis as legitimate), [5] publish to YouTube, podcast, tweet.
- References:
David Novick (UT El Paso), in his presentation "Research on Help", echoed the alarm with results of new studies of user behavior. Most user frustration came from newbie errors, complexity, delay, and awkward UIs. Their study of college-educated users struggling to learn a required application showed this:
- Users generally use Help very little, and they use printed documentation almost not at all
- Majority succeeded without the Help: sought help from others, and self-taught from trial and error
- Users waste a lot of time with ineffective workarounds
- Tutorials did increase use of Help
- Users want examples, scenarios
- Users performed worse with age, and they were aware of their own ability level
- Use of Help itself did not generally improve task performance
Thanks for the great write-ups on the WritersUA conference. I really enjoyed the details you included, especially with the posts on documentation usability. I added a few links to your posts on writerriver.com. Keep it up. (By the way, an About page would have been nice, since I'm curious to know more about you.)
Posted by: Tom Johnson | April 09, 2009 at 09:43 AM