Chapter 7

The most interesting part of this chapter for myself was the short section on icons and symbols.  I find the idea of a symbol that is recognized internationally to be a staggering feat of mankind.  An icon such as this is the ultimate use of visual aids because it completely conveys all necessary information.  Even though there is very little information to communicate, icons are extremely effective; at a literally a single glance the icon has done it's job.  Icons are like a common language between countless cultures, how cool.

Chapter 5

I'm having a hard time finding anything to say about the chapter in particular, so I will do something similar to my post about chapter 2 and reference an example from my job.  I'll start by saying that my superiors implemented the procedures we used to make this document, so at the time I was just learning the concepts.  When we were producing the manual for our product, we incorporated many of the structural aspects mentioned in this chapter. We began the document with an overview, as it would be quite large and hard to navigate otherwise.  The chunking of our manual was quite easy to accomplish as our product is compartmentalized by design.  We simply wrote the chunks about each facet of our program.  The sequencing we used was most like that of spacial sequencing, we sort of iterated through the facets of our program, in the order the user would encounter them (had they been using it properly).  Overall, I was very proud of our work.  Most people working on the project had never written a large technical document, including myself, and it was a tremendous learning experience.

Chapter 2

While working at my current job (software developer) I have participated in the reviewing and editing of a few different technical documents.  As a team, the development staff at my company reviewed a prototype, and eventually edited the final copy of our main product manual.  We considered many different traits of our customers when deciding the voice to write it in, such as their ethnicity and technical background.  I remember one of our dev's had written a computer science colloquial into the manual that referred to the resetting of a database by asking the user to 'blow away' the database.  I brought up the fact that only a portion of our users will have any database background, and that we should definitely word this differently.  This was a tremendous learning experience for me in the area of technical communication, and this chapter highlighted and expanded on many of the concepts I learned.

Chapter 1

This chapter mostly told me what I already knew, however, one thing I did not know was that the majority of technical communication is persuasive.  I never would have thought that the writer of an instruction manual would be trying to persuade me of something, but now that I think about it, the writer was definitely trying to convince me that what I was doing was worthwhile.  He was trying to persuade me to continue using the product for which the instructions were written, as well as to continue reading the instructions themselves.  I will definitely keep this in mind throughout this course.

Ethnography Readings

My favorite article of this set was the one about the ethnography done on air traffic controllers, probably because I'm a CS major and user interface design has been an interest of mine.  I found the techniques carried out by the ethnographers very interesting and eye opening.  Their familiarity with all other types of studies was very impressive, it made for a very effective study, and an interesting read.  I thought it was very smart that they actually carried out tasks expected of the controllers, in order to gain an intimate understanding of their needs.  Overall, I would have enjoyed being one of the software developers on that project.

Chapter 4

This chapter discusses an approach to user study that is more like the approaches we learned in Computer Science.  It focuses on categorizing the user in a variety of different ways, in order to come up with a delivery that is effective.  I think that the approach of ethnography in conjunction with this more structured usability test would produce a document with such usability, that the users themselves would feel as if they wrote it.  The biggest point I took away from reading this chapter was that the language used must be tailored as closely as possible to the language used by the reader.  I can think of a few examples of writing I have produced that have not accomplished this.

Color Theory

This is my first exposure to the science of color that I never knew existed.  It seems this extremely subjective facet of human life actually has quite a bit of theory and fact behind it.  As I was reading, I started likening this theoretical approach of color to that of the theoretical approach to music.  Ultimately it is up to us to take in a stimuli and decide whether or not it is appealing.  However, through what I can only assume is huge amounts of research, we find that we can tip the scales in our favor with a bit of logic.  The part about triadic and tetradic color schemes reminded me of chord charts for guitar.  It basically shows we have boiled things down to a simple 'this works well with that' system, like we have more or less solved the issue of what colors to use.  It is crazy how well people can come to understand something as seemingly infinite as color combinations.

People People People

I thought it was interesting just how intimate they recommend you become with your users.  It really makes sense to have them ever-present in your mind while you work on the product they will use.  This way, as you design features and adjust the site, your own mind will catch you and say things like 'this might be difficult for them to accomplish given that ...' or 'It might be more clear if the information was organized this way'.  Creating the personas for your users takes this a step further; they say companies will try to actually materialize their users in the office.  Having them right there next to you while you work almost forces you to keep them in mind as you design.