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By Angie Gardi, LSC Member
With the expanding role of technical communicators comes the need for solid grounding in human factors. Whether you are a technical writer, technical editor, user-interface designer, or a usability tester, becoming more knowledgeable in the principles of human factors can help you design, structure, and present your information in a way that makes your product more usable. Human factors—the topic presented at the October 8, 2003, Lone Star Chapter meeting by Andrea L. Ames, Senior Information Developer—are characteristics of users that influence or affect their experiences while using our products, such as problem-solving techniques, learning styles, and memory.
"Human factors is about designing things for people," Andrea Ames said. "It's how people interact with physical stuff." Users receive information in layers—both intended and perceived. The layers include content, presentation, navigation, and medium, with content being the core of the product. You must design the layers of the product in a way where the content is transparent and easy to understand. If you want the users to "Click OK" but the instruction is buried in a paragraph, how are they going to find it? They would have to look through layers of stuff to find it. "Don't make users read. People don't like to read. They scan and skim," Ames said. And pay attention to the words you use in your document. "Words are the biggest guide to users," Ames added. According to Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think, words are the scent of information. "It's like leaving bread crumbs," Ames said. "The stronger the scent or the bigger the bread crumbs, the easier for the user to find what they need."
According to Ames, users don't enter our world; we (our products and information) enter theirs. Developing and designing products for people, she says, centers around the engineering (ergonomics) and, more specifically, around the cognitive psychology—the study of human behavior in light of the internal mental processes that drive it—such as perception and sensation, memory, problem solving abilities, and individuals' learning styles. Technical communicators must have an understanding of how people perceive, store, and retrieve things and understand what must be controlled to help design around these variables. People's perception is affected by many things, such as experience, expectation, habit, ability, goals, motivation, memory capacity, reading strategy, learning style, and approach to problem solving.
Users want to quickly solve their problems. They look for the closest solution to their problem and do it. If that doesn't work, they try something else. This process is what Ames calls "satisfice," meaning they examine the first solution that comes to mind, and if there are no foreseeable problems, they go for it. They rely on our information for solving their problems, which is the purpose of our product. Users don't figure things out; they muddle through as if using the Braille method. For example, if they were looking for a specific item under the menu bar such as "spell check," they would look under Tools, and once they find it, they move on to the next thing. She advises eliminating the question marks, such as:
For example, instead of referring to a common item, like spell check, as a "blue tool," use a more appropriate word, which would help them figure out how to find it. "Blue tool" means nothing to the user, but "spell check" aptly describes the function of the item.
Other important factors to consider are architecture and design. If the architecture of the product is not designed well then the information will not be easy to find by your users. Try to anticipate the needs of the users. What would be the point of putting an installation guide in the help menu of a program? The user needs the guide to install the program, but the program would need to be installed to see the guide. Building a navigational infrastructure is very important to prevent this kind of dilemma.
By applying the principles Ames discussed in this presentation, we, as technical communicators, will be better equipped to analyze users' needs and learning styles, select the most effective design, build better navigational infrastructures, and develop content that gives users everything they need in order for them to quickly identify and resolve problems.
For more information about human factors, Andrea Ames suggests the following books:
You can also view Andrea's PowerPoint presentation.
Andrea Ames leads information development for a large data management product at the IBM Corporation. She is an Associate Fellow and a member of the STC International Board of Directors (she will be President in 2004—05). She is the coordinator for two University of California Extension technical communication certificates, and a published author and freelance writer. She teaches at the university level and speaks internationally at professional conferences. She can be reached at: aames@pobox.com.