The editor and principal writer of Producing Quality Technical Information (1983) responds to the commentaries: answering questions about the sources of PQTI; discussing what the System Information group at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory were doing about usability from 1979 to 1983; comparing the predecessor nine "ease-of-use factors" with the seven "qualities" of PQTI and the nine "quality characteristics" of Prentice Hall's subsequent editions of PQTI, published under the title Developing Quality Technical Information; and revealing his own motives and thought processes in working on several usability initiatives in the laboratory at that time, including the publication of PQTI.
Producing Quality Technical Information played a major role in the shift from product-oriented information to user-oriented information. It brought to a large community of technical communicators an awareness of the role that technical information should play: not a description of a technical product or process but, rather, a description of what people need to do to use the product or perform the process. This shift in focus -- from product to user -- led to many changes in our profession and in our professional careers. No longer mere documentors of what others had done, we emerged as professionals who added value and usability to the project on which we worked.
Two complementary cognitive theories help to explain how novice technical communicators learn effective search methods: information foraging theory, a model of information-seeking behavior that combines human-computer interaction with anthropological constructs; and strategic planning theory, a communication model of how humans plan and achieve social goals. The paper includes an extended example of how a new technical communicator might learn to use both models on the job.
In this study I attempt (a) to specify a theory that explains the historical character of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, and (b) use that theory to cast light on a particular instance of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, that of the Web, principally, the issue of structured markup and discussions about precisely what a structured Web should look like, the work it should do, and so forth. What I attempt to identify, describe, and analyze, are the norms and conventions that govern the production of written discourse.
In a series of publications, Edmond Weiss describes the change in both programming and technical writing from an artistic craft to an engineering discipline. The change brought numerous benefits to the users and readers, to the programmers and writers, and to the companies they work for. In exchange for those benefits, Weiss says, writers had to give up control over the content and format of the documentation. They also lost the esthetic pride of creating a work of art and the personal satisfaction of teaching and protecting the reader. Weiss anticipates a future in which technical documentation is generated automatically and the technical documentor's job is merely to feed information databases. In the conclusion, I note a few differences of opinion, but overall I agree with Weiss's view.
The expressed promise in the title of Producing Quality Technical Information is that following its prescriptions will yield "quality" technical information. This commentary asks what the term quality means here and whether the manual delivers on its promise. In other words, which of the several senses of quality is intended in the title, and the does the publication deliver as promised? That is, which of the major quality schemes corresponds to the rationale of the text: legalistic quality, in which quality is conformity to a long list of detailed regulations and specifications (as in ISO 9000); principle-based quality, in which quality is the result of working according to a small set of broad precepts; or mystical quality, in which quality is an indefinable property or spiritual construct, toward which virtuous people should aspire.
The assertion that technical communicators tend to be `amateurs'---that is, lovers of their work--- is a claim with little foundation. Arguments toward regimentation and systematization of documentation writing are not calls to professionalize a currently-immature field, but rather attempts to emulate the hierarchy we have seen implemented in microprocessor engineering in the 1970s, software development in the 1980s, and content management in the 1990s. Such `egoless' methods may offer advantages to employers, but should not necessarily be considered `progress.'
Information foraging theory and strategic planning theory can help technical communicators think about effective research methods. A broader understanding of social theory can complement Gattis's approach by adding considerations related to underlying ideological assumptions and to how research practices are situated in the larger contexts of organizations, communities, and cultures.
The author responds by agreeing with some of the commentator's points and by clarifying his meaning related to others. He also offers additional discussion and references to the literature concerning some of the article's ideas.
In recent years, an emphasis on quality has emerged in a variety of organizations and in several fields, including technical documentation. Producing Quality Technical Information (PQTI) was one of the first comprehensive discussions of the quality of documentation. An important contribution of the book is in identifying quality as multiple, measurable dimensions that can be defined and measured (previous views of quality identified it more as some elusive thing that could be identified if present but was difficult to articulate and describe). Despite its contributions to the quality discussion, PQTI runs the risk of simplifying the quality process, reducing quality to a simple checklist that information developers can use to develop effective documentation. PQTI fails to address the fluid nature of some aspects of quality: some dimensions that are important in assessing one document may be less important or irrelevant with other documents. Additionally, PQTI falls short of accounting for the larger contextual framing of documents--that the importance of individual dimensions of quality changes depending upon the audience, context, and purpose of the document.This commentary suggests that all quality efforts should be grounded in customer data and user-centered design processes, and that we should learn to better differentiate among quality dimensions, determining those dimensions that are essential to customer satisfaction and those that are merely attractive. Through increased attention to developing the quality of information, organizations can better differentiate their products and services, facilitate greater productivity, and increase customer satisfactions, all significant activities in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Principles of information style and design have been around for years. Look at the shelf life of Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, published in 1959 and still a bestseller. Producing Quality Technical Information is a gem of a book, whose precise, bullet-style list of seven requirements and a checklist is now even more insightful in the fast-paced world of online information and the World-Wide Web. As a writer, I'm amazed how the IBM authors crystallized the essence of good information design in less than 100 pages. This commentary describes how the book's seven qualities and thirty individual requirements can easily and usefully be extrapolated to address key issues of interface design and usability for today's professional designers and developers.
Changing needs in technical communications alter but are far from eliminating the personal satisfactions of the individual practitioner. They expand rather than contract opportunities.
As the environments in which we use technology become more complex and more diverse, we need to extend and expand our notion of usability to include a broad spectrum of users and user activities. We take as an example the case of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's distributed education program for human-computer interaction (HCI). While HCI is the subject matter for the courses, the courses themselves present a challenging case study in HCI usability.
The author discusses two contextual problems associated with responses to his article. After discussing how documentation relates to business models, he concludes that communicators, to ensure their longevity, should pursue knowledge management opportunities.
The author discusses two contextual problems associated with responses to his article. After discussing how documentation relates to business models, he concludes that communicators, to ensure their longevity, should pursue knowledge management opportunities.
Each August, the ACM Journal of Computer Documentation reprints a classic article, book chapter, or report along with several analytical commentaries and a response by the author of the classic document. In this context, a “classic” document means one that was published at least five years ago but is no longer in print. It also means one that raises issues of lasting importance to the profession. The article featured in the current issue certainly qualifies as a classic. Frank Halasz, “Reflections on NoteCards: Seven Issues for the Next Generation of Hypermedia Systems,” grew out of his closing keynote address at the ACM Hypertext ’87 Conference (Halasz, 1987) and was published in the Communications of the ACM the following year (Halasz, 1988). Halasz’s article focuses on seven “fundamental weaknesses in the hypermedia model” underlying NoteCards, that is, “on the ways in which the system falls short in meeting the needs and preferences of its users” (Halasz, 1988, p. 841): 1. Search and query in a hypermedia network. Navigational access of hypermedia networks (“recursive descent through an increasingly specific category structure” (Halasz, 1988, p. 842)) is adequate for small, familiar, homogeneous tasks, but large, unfamiliar, heterogeneous network structures require a query-based access mechanism for both content search and structure search. 2. Composites—augmenting the basic node and link model. The hypermedia model lacks a way of representing and manipulating groups of nodes and links independently of their components. The solution Halasz proposes is to make composition a primitive construct in the basic hypermedia model and to support inclusion (“is part of”) relationships in addition to reference links. 3. Virtual structures for dealing with changing information. The static nature of hypertext leads to the problem of keeping the content up to date. To solve this problem, Halasz suggests virtual structures that are calculated dynamically. This idea of virtual structures derives from the concept of views (virtual tables) in relational database systems. 4. Computation in (over) hypermedia networks. Hypermedia systems store and retrieve information passively, but they could incorporate inference engines like those in knowledge-based AI systems, which process information actively. 5. Versioning. A versioning mechanism would enable users to track Hypermedia systems in the new millennium
s of over, and lks, It’s sad. I went to go click on some SIGDOC files still on my hard drive to aid m in composing this review, and they wouldn't open. I had no software would recognize these files and open them again. That's both a sign of long it's been since I was President as well as th e ephemeral nature of so much in the computer industry—and it's th at fleeting nature of facts a nd importance that caused me to leave as I have. Mind you, I still write about the ideas behind applied writing—my boo From Millwrights to Shipwrights to the Twenty-first Century , contained chapters on the first computer user manual written in 1949 as well as on the ation of IBM’s first computer manual in 1954. But I was driven to find trut about writing and the writing process that transcend the latest Web bro characteristics or the syntax of HTML. Thus my most recent book, Exploding Steamboats: The Technology, Politics and Rhetoric Behind the Steamboa of 1838; considers the investigations regarding steamboats blowing up an reports which tried to change US policy towards their safety and design; the inability of contemporary audiences to use effectively the reports. T passed the wrong law, and the explosions and deaths continued. So it goes... When I began as President after Diana, SIGDOC was still pretty m THE only game in town if you wanted to discuss the communication asp of computers, but already other SIGs such as SIGLINL and SIGUCS w beginning to carve off some of the most interesti ng elements of our or iginally unified approach to computer documentation. My book, Writing Better Computer User Documentation, Version 2.0 also had this unified approach. STC was still focused on automobiles and radios, and computers had just a part of their yearly conference. IEEE was, as their named implied, also fo ing on the content of our interest, but they s emed to have lots of material on oral communication and such expensive annual meetings that no one w go. By the time I stopped bei ng President in 1993, the sense of compute r documentation as a unified whole had ended. When one has such competent folk as Bill Horton writing entire books just on icons, you know that the days single book coverage...or single SIG coverage were gone forever. More when the 20,000 member STC decides that it will focus on computers writing, then the tiny 1200 member SIGDOC gets lost in the welter of ta papers, presentations, and conventions. So it goes...
In past issues of JCD, we have employed graduat e students in rhetoric and technical communication to provide their point of view on new books in the field. In this issue’s book commentary, I have taken this opportunity one more time as students in a graduate seminar at Michigan Tech Histories and Theories of Technical Communication read, discussed, and then responded to Bernadette’s Longo’s Spurious Coin, A History of Science. Management, and Technical Writing (SUNY Press, 2000). At the e nd of the term, I selected two o f the student’s commentaries for publication commentaries that have quite different formats and perspectives on the book. The first commentary is an extended “virtual conversation” of the book fostered by one of the students in the seminar, David Gaskill. In a somewhat different approach to the commentary, Gaskill contact ed three scholars and teachers of technical communication who agreed to take part in the conversation about Spurious Coin, Mary Been, Pete Praetorius, and Margaret Hundleby. The result of the on-line conversation by these three technical communicators is compelli ng in a number of ways. For example, they begin the commentary by enacting a Greek chorus a method that not only is creative, but that sit uates their discussion immediately in one of the same historical contexts that Longo herself investigates in the book. Further, they discuss the text from several vantage points: theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and practical. The result is a thorough analysis of the book, and one that is stimulating reading to boot. The second commentary is a “solo” piece by Michelle Trim, a Ph.D. student in the Michigan Tech Rhetoric and Technical Communication program. Coming at the text as a social critic, Trim considers the gaps that Longo’s text leaves in its wake. That is, she looks at a number of instances in the book where other directions or turns might have been taken. Her approach is not one that is unduly critical, however. Instead, she uses these openings to pose questions for future research that might be spawned from the rich text that Longo has provided. Spurious Coin is a book that contributes much to the field of technical communication. We are certainly lacking in enough history of the profession, and Longo’s book is a welcome addition. I hope that you will enjoy both Longo’s forays into our past, and the conversations that these five writers have had over this important scholarly text.
