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SIGDOC Newsletter
March 2007
:: Volume 8, Number 1
Features
More thoughts on what is Design of Communication? by Rob Pierce
More
thoughts on what is Design of Communication?
By Rob Pierce
In the past two years, more than ever, there’s been much discussion
and musing about what exactly falls within the bounds of what is termed “Design
of Communication.”
Developing technical content and “Communication” elicits
less debate or discussion than the Design aspects of communication. Design
is a simple and elegant term that represents much potential or hidden
complexity. And, good design requires a broader array of skills and perspectives
from designers than the skills required for developing information. But
what are some of the broad areas of skills and study for good design?
It is clear that SIGDOC and the concept of the design of communication
cover a broad array of potential areas of research and discussion, which
travels far beyond the bounds of developing technical content. Because
designers of communication may work in Computer Science rather than technical
communication, clarity on what topics comprise the "DOC" in
SIGDOC is important, in order to better define and classify areas of
design of communication.
Curiously, this reminds me of something completely unrelated in my personal
life.
My oldest daughter, a Junior in high school is very good in mathematics,
and she’s also very creative and takes a lot of art classes and
excels in them. As she begins the planning process for college, I’ve
thought it useful to help her consider majors or fields of study in college
that might make her both successful and happy, by finding what subjects
or profession might be something she can do well and enjoy.
What areas of study bring together abstract reasoning and creativity,
as well as logic, intuition, and innovation? “Design” is
the first term that comes to mind, for me. “Architecture” follows
closely behind. So, the three buzzwords around the house are now, “art,
design, and architecture.”
Art, design, and architecture are also terms very much in the forefront
of any discussion about Design of Communication.
- Art might comprise
the presentation, the format, the look of a Web page, the appearance
of UI widgets, and other creative design aspects
of what a user “experiences.”
- Design likely covers
both the creative and the technical aspects of a planned solution.
It might cover look and feel, but also the nuts
and bolts plans for a technical solution, such as workflow modeling,
sequence diagrams or flowcharts, object models
- Architecture,
the elite-sounding role, incorporates both the high level vision
of a design and implementation of each component or
aspect of a complete use case, project, product, or other form of solution
and attempts to create an innovative, elegant, and practical blueprint
structure that ensures a successful delivery of the of the design and
implementation.
Notice that none of these aspects of design of communication even touches
on actual content development or what we might call technical writing,
information development, user assistance, or technical communication.
I am interested in gathering input on the perspectives of our SIGDOC
members and the design and development communities at large both in academic
settings and in industry-specific settings.
I would like to start this initiative by listing the articles I’ve
written for the seven years since I began as the editor of the ACM SIGDOC
Newsletter. What follows is the list of the titles of these articles
and my proposed beginning of a possible book on the subject that I am
hoping can be accomplished as a collaboration with you, the SIGDOC membership.
Designing and implementing communication
SIGDOC Newsletter Articles on Information Development, User Assistance,
User Experience, and Best Practices in Software Development:
- Reverse
Engineering
- Identifying your Audience
- Documenting Client/Server APIs
- My SIGDOC Conference Trip Report
- Seamless Integrations with Engineering,
or, Keeping Documentation Issues Transparent
- Maintaining Multiple Versions
of Documentation Source Files
- Working with Engineers
- Using a Database to Manage Documentation
Changes
- Working with Technical Support Personnel to Better Identify
Your Audience
- One Aspect of Optimizing Reference Documentation
- Is Your Organization’s Technical Content in Sync?
- What is
Round-Trip Engineering to an Information Developer?
- Affinity and the
Application of Best Practices
- Prototyping an Information Architecture
- Documentation tooling and
conversion issues
- Modeling an information architecture
- An Introduction to Documentation
Testing
- Parallel Design and Development for Documentation Projects
- Meeting
Your Audience and Gaining Customer Insight, Part I
- Meeting Your Audience
and Gaining Customer Insight, Part II
- Meeting Your Audience and Gaining
Customer Insight, Part III
- The World is not English
- SIGDOC 06 Conference Synopsis, with thoughts
on what is Design of Communication?
I am hoping you will be willing to contribute to my request for determining
what Design of Communication (DOC) represents by sharing your thoughts
on any aspect of what you view as being part of DOC. Input of any form
and length are welcome. Feel free to provide:
- Simple email fragments
or longer notes
- Pointers to the best SIGDOC papers that you think are
relevant to a primary area of DOC
- Responses to any of the previous Newsletter Feature articles I’ve
written over the past six years.
I am asking for you to point me to existing SIGDOC papers and current
work that best represents and exemplifies what we currently view as "design
of communication." I want to try to get member input on what are
the broad categories that are viewed as encompassing what "DOC" in
SIGDOC represents.
If any of you have suggestions, pointers to papers you or your colleagues
have written, or any relevant input (or lists of categories for "DOC"),
please share and it will be most appreciated. If you have strong and/or
negative opinions about my request, please share that as well.
I do believe that while we use the term “communication” we
are actually more focused on “information” because, say,
advertising, and public announcements are just two forms of many types
of communication that are outside the scope of SIGDOC. Whether we narrow
the scope of communication to digital communication or technical communication
or something else, I believe that by design of communication in the context
of the ACM SIGDOC, we are talking about the design, implementation, and
delivery of technical content in some form, for some audience.
The benefits to the user experience (UX) through well-designed user
assistance (UA) are dependent on the quality of the:
- User-centered design
- Information development
- Visual design
Design for the user
Focusing design on the user in part requires an assessment of the use
cases that users will need to know. Use cases are similar to tasks
or collections of tasks. Thus, an area in the design of communication
may include task modeling to create task-based information architectures
that utilize metadata, maps, role-based and goal-based models, hierarchical
task analyses, and tables of contents or other search innovations.
Task modeling may also include combining artistic skills with knowledge
of interaction design to contribute to products across a company's
portfolio.
By assessing the usability of existing solutions, designers may help
enhance the communication of design representations to clients, and work
with them to focus on visually enhancing products in a portfolio that
meets the needs of and requests from the client.
Some of the areas that might be addressed by task modeling include:
- Actively participating in communities dedicated to driving consistency
in design across all products.
- UI design and implementation on a variety
of projects.
- Web site modeling and e-commerce applications.
- Create design methods,
Web guidelines, content publishing tools, collaboration tools, and
education on design methods.
- Increase the focus on the business value
of what a company creates.
- Leverage career experiences to help user
experience initiatives connect with or be more integrated with product
development.
User interface architecture and design may include work on design elements
with specific focus on user interface design patterns.
Development of information
Some of the terms or keywords that come to mind in the context of “DOC” that
may be helpful to list are “information design,” “information
development,” “information architecture,” “use
cases,” “topic types,” “navigation,” “searchability,” “performance” (speed
of the system and getting to the correct topics), “presentation,” “componentization,” establishing
and enforcing information development “processes,” or “workflows.”
Information development is similar to software development processes
in many ways in terms of managing requirements, managing assets, managing
change (and requests for change), testing, building and releasing, getting
customer feedback, doing usability studies or tests, and training. Also
included in the development of information are the guidelines, tools,
processes, and best practices for developing or writing the actual technical
content.
Like the software development model, there may be globally distributed
development (GDD) - for example, some doc deliverables may be developed
in other countries, or tested at other sites. Also, like software that
has been localized to non-English languages, there may be language or
translation issues for deliverables that are translated into different
languages, including even more complex layers of building, testing, and
delivery.
Design of information
Design of information comprises both design concepts and user experience
work. Many design aspects of communication are built on:
- user interface design elements
- converged visual styles
- a repository for storing, searching, and
collaborating on these artifacts
- user experience tooling
- visual design tooling
User interface (UI) design patterns, widgets, effects, graphics and
visual style are reusable elements of design that help ensure innovative,
intuitive, engaging, and consumable user interface designs. Design elements
can be consolidated into a set of elements to be used to build applications
for a more consistent user experience.
Designers review, design, and develop UI visual style elements and assess
and make recommendations on UI visual styles.
Thoughts on Design of Communication
To assist in the discussion, the following thoughts were shared by the
invited speakers at the 2006 SIGDOC conference. A fuller list of their
discussion was included in last month’s Newsletter feature article
(see http://www.sigdoc.org/newsletter/archives/dec06features.html). As Klaus Jantke (Professor of Multimedia Applications, Technical University
Ilmenau, Institute for Media and Communication Science) wrote, “the
origins of SIGDOC in the documents/documentation field have to be respected.
The original core of "technical writing" will somehow survive.
But does it need to be the group's focus?!”
Jantke sees four different perspectives in the "Design of communication" within
the context of SIGDOC:
- The theoretical perspective - asking for models of communication,
for the conditions of understanding (including aspects of cognitive
psychology)
and the like.
- The technological perspective - dealing with the peculiarities
of communication and communication design under certain technological
constraints
or asking for the exploitation of new technologies.
- The system-oriented perspective
- discussing all kinds of systems in use including design tools.
- The application-oriented perspective - discussing the issues driven by
application cases such as teaching/learning, entertainment, conflict
resolution in enterprises or politics, and so on.
In addition, for every perspective, Jantke believes there should be
discussion for the following potential areas and issues that arise with
design and communication:
- Design that aims at security of communication is a particularly
relevant sub-discipline.
- One may ask for the potentials of virtual
reality (VR) technologies,
but one may also ask for the problems in VR reception such as inattentional
blindness.
- In systems such as Knowledge Management systems, in my opinion,
there is not anything such as "knowledge management". The problem
we are dealing with might be better called "information logistics".
This view leads to questions for an appropriate design.
- Working on
how might e-learning and gaming be integrated for enhancing application
systems with playful learning opportunities.
For every perspective, one could easily list a number of further
topics. This illustrates how large, attractive, but also complex the "Design
of Communication" area is. Dr. Nicolas Spyratos (Professor of Computer Science, at the University
of Paris-South, and Head of the Database Group, at the Laboratory for
Research in Informatics), whose current research interests include information
integration (mediators, data warehouses, data mining), conceptual modeling,
and logic and databases agrees that “there is much more to the
design of communication than just technical writing. I believe that technical
writing is an important component in the design of communication but
it's just one component.”
He believes that design of communication is the weak point of information
technology today. Specific areas where he sees much room for improvement
are:
- Searchability and retrievability – “Information is useful
only if you can get to it easily.”
- Interface design
- Personalization or customization of information content
- Context
sensitive information gathering
As a former SIGDOC Chair, Kathy Haramundanis, wrote, “Design of
Communication encompasses both the work of the technologist as well as
the writer, and as such it has broad application. Technical writing is
a craft and computer science is engineering. Some merging of these occur
with those who examine the interactions between users, information, and
technology, but we need more rigor and experiments to learn what is optimum,
or perhaps more usefully, to learn what to avoid. And the results will
probably depend to some extent on the technology itself, and what it
enables the user to do. We should not forget that both writing and technology
have both vertical and horizontal implications in the marketplace, and
ways to strengthen the active matrix in both these dimensions would be
useful.
I think design of communication includes all the technical writing,
user-oriented technology, and human-computer/computer-human interaction
topics that we can list. My main thought is structure: how should we
structure the information the user needs? Note that we need a variety
of structures to accommodate the needs of the several vertical and
horizontal cells in the marketplace matrix. For example, if we are
writing for a medical audience, a vertical column in the matrix, certain
structures will apply more commonly than if we are writing for an audience
of auto mechanics who need to repair a vehicle. Also note that the
technologist approaches design of communication based on a desire to
expose the capabilities of the tool developed. This desire may not
consider how the tool is to be used, which may be a contribution that
the writer can make. ('Tool' is used here as a generic word and could
mean any hardware or software application.)
What we say about SIGDOC
The following is what we say on our SIGDOC Web site about who and what
we are:
The ACM Special Interest Group on design of communication provides a
forum for the effective interchange of information on technical documentation,
software development, and user support for computer products and systems.
The SIG studies processes, methods, and technologies for communicating
information online, with hypermedia, multimedia, and in print. Members
include technical communication professionals, computer scientists, educators,
and researchers, as well as system designers, developers, usability specialists,
and managers responsible for producing or supervising the creation of
documentation, online help systems, and end user interfaces.
The mission of SIGDOC includes:
- Promoting the professional development
of its members;
- Encouraging interdisciplinary problem solving related
to online and print documentation and to communication technologies;
- Providing avenues for publication and the exchange of professional
information;
- Supporting research that focuses on the needs and goals of humans
in technological contexts; and
- Supporting the development and improvement
of communication technologies,
including applications, interfaces, and documentation.
The SIGDOC name change in 2003 from “documentation” to “design
of communication” was based on several years' of discussions held
among Board members and at the annual conference. Both the change and
the new name have sparked much interest and discussion.
Can you identify existing SIGDOC papers and current work that best
represents and exemplifies what we currently view as "design of
communication?" I look forward to receiving your input on the
broad categories that members view as encompassing what the "DOC" in
SIGDOC represents.
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