Information Design

Study Notes

Brendan Quinn
Started 2013
Contents
SECTION 1: GRAMMAR.......................................................................................................................................5
1.1 Parts of Speech......................................................................................................................................5
1. Nouns......................................................................................................................................................5
2. Determiners............................................................................................................................................6
3. Pronouns.................................................................................................................................................7
4. Verbs.......................................................................................................................................................7
5. Adjectives.............................................................................................................................................10
6. Adverbs.................................................................................................................................................10
7. Prepositions..........................................................................................................................................10
8. Conjunctions.........................................................................................................................................10
9. Interjections..........................................................................................................................................10
1.2 Rules of Grammar...............................................................................................................................11
Subject-verb agreement..................................................................................................................................11
Parallel Structure............................................................................................................................................12
Dangling Participles.......................................................................................................................................13
Modifying Phrases.........................................................................................................................................14
SECTION 2: PUNCTUATION.........................................................................................................................15
Apostrophes....................................................................................................................................................15
Commas..........................................................................................................................................................17
Semicolons.....................................................................................................................................................20
Hyphens..........................................................................................................................................................20
Compound Words..........................................................................................................................................20
The En Dash (or en rule)................................................................................................................................23
The em dash (or em rule)...............................................................................................................................23
Quotations......................................................................................................................................................24
GDID 701: PROFESSIONAL WRITING AND EDITING..................................................................................25
Week 1: Introduction.................................................................................................................................25
Week 2: The Writing Process....................................................................................................................26
Week 3: Principles of Good Writing.........................................................................................................28
Week 4: Audience Analysis......................................................................................................................31
Week 5: Persuasive Writing......................................................................................................................32
Week 7: The Look of Writing...................................................................................................................34
Week 8: Writing for the Web....................................................................................................................35
Week 9: Introduction to Editing................................................................................................................36
Week 10: Substantive editing..................................................................................................................39
Week 11: Copyediting.............................................................................................................................43
Week 12: Author Queries and Style Guides............................................................................................44
GDID 702: PROFESSIONAL ISSUES IN INFORMATION DESIGN...............................................................46
Week 1: Introduction.................................................................................................................................46
 Week 2: What is Information Design?......................................................................................................49
Week 13: Localization................................................................................................................................51
GDID 703: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT...................................................................................................54
Week 1: Introduction.................................................................................................................................54
Week 2: The Information Lifecycle..........................................................................................................56
Week 3: Content Management..................................................................................................................58
Week 4: Information Planning..................................................................................................................61
Week 5: Content Specification and Task Analysis...................................................................................66
Week 6: Scoping and Risk........................................................................................................................71
Week 7: Tracking and Revision................................................................................................................75
Week 8: Metadata......................................................................................................................................79
Week 9: XML and Structured Authoring..................................................................................................83
Week 10: Knowledge Management.........................................................................................................87
Week 11: Electronic Document Management.........................................................................................92
Week 12: Electronic Records Management...............................................................................................94
Week 13: Change Management and Information Governance................................................................97
GDID 704: VISUAL DESIGN............................................................................................................................102
Week 1: Introduction...............................................................................................................................102
Week 2 / 3: Elements of Visual Design Part 1 & 2 (CRAP)................................................................105
Week 4: Elements of Visual Design: BURPE........................................................................................109
Week 5: Audience Analysis....................................................................................................................111
Week 6: Typefaces..................................................................................................................................117
Week 7: Layouts & Grids........................................................................................................................124
Week 8: Evaluating Design Problems.....................................................................................................127
Week 9: Colour Theory...........................................................................................................................130
Week 10: Navigation Cues....................................................................................................................137
Week 11: Maximising Meaning with Images...........................................................................................140
Week 12: Data Visualization............................................................................................................................145
Week 13: Charts & Diagrams..........................................................................................................................148
Week 14: Producing Professional Documents.................................................................................................162
GDID 705: PRINCIPLES OF USER EXPERIENCE.........................................................................................163
APPENDIX 1: INFORMATION DESIGN WEBSITES..............................................................................165
Professional Industry Bodies........................................................................................................................165
Tech Comms Software Vendor Websites....................................................................................................165
Writing Sites & Blogs..................................................................................................................................165
Communication............................................................................................................................................166
Information / Content Management.............................................................................................................166
Visual Design...............................................................................................................................................167
Typography..................................................................................................................................................167
Usability.......................................................................................................................................................168
Other Resources...........................................................................................................................................169
APPENDIX 2: MISCELLANEOUS.............................................................................................................170
APPENDIX 3: Commonly Misused Words..................................................................................................172
SECTION 1: GRAMMAR
1.1 Parts of Speech
1. Nouns
2. Determiners
3. Pronouns
4. Verbs
5. Adjectives
6. Adverbs
7. Prepositions
8. Conjunctions
9. Interjections

NOTE: Wikipedia doesn’t class interjections as parts of speech, because they don’t conform to clause and
sentence structure.

Background Information
Independent (main) clause
An independent clause (or main clause) is a clause that can stand by itself, also known as a simple sentence. An
independent clause contains a subject and a predicate; it makes sense by itself.

Dependent (subordinate) clause

A dependent clause (or a subordinate clause) is a clause that augments an independent clause with additional
information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses either modify the independent
clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it.

Contains both verb and subject.

Predicate
One of two main parts of a sentence, the other part being the subject; the purpose of the predicate is to modify
the subject. The predicate provides information about the subject, such as what the subject is, what the
subject is doing, or what the subject is like.

1. Nouns
Names of people, places, and things. The most numerous word class in English.

Proper & Common Nouns

Proper nouns refer to a unique, specific entity. Common nouns refer to a class of entities.

People’s names Brendan, Caton, Alexander, Mary

Place Names Auckland, Sydney, the Eiffel Tower

Dates & spans of time Tuesday, Christmas Eve, the Fifth of November

Titles of rank or relationship The French Ambassador, Head Teacher Miss and
nicknames Dunn, The Duke of Wellington

Titles & subtitles of works (books, A Tale of Two Cities, The Sunday Star-Times,
films, music, magazines, newspapers etc) Dark Side of the Moon, National Geographic,
Breaking Bad
Nationalities French food, Italian Men, Mexican women

Acronyms and abbreviations IRD, NCEA, GDID

Brand names Band-Aid, Xerox

Concrete nouns Abstract nouns

Garden Love
Tree Dance
Druid Wisdom

Countable Non-countable
Cat Milk
Dog Wine
Car Rain

Noun Phrases
Function grammatically as nouns within sentences, for example as the subject or object or a verb.

Most noun phrases take the following form (not all elements need to be present):

Determiner + pre-modifiers + Noun + post-modifiers / complement

That rather attractive, young college student you were talking to

2. Determiners
English determiners constitute a relatively small class of words. A determiner is a word, phrase or affix that
occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in
the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of
a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular
number or quantity, etc.

Most determiners have traditionally been classed alongside adjectives.

Common kinds of determiners include:

 definite and indefinite articles (like the English the and a[n]), and in some contexts some
 demonstratives like this, that, and which
 possessive determiners (like my, their, and whose); the role of determiner can also be played by noun
possessive forms such as John's and the girl's
 quantifiers (like all, many, various, few, no and several, and numerals)
There are also many phrases (such as a couple of) that can play the role of determiners.

Determiners are used in the formation of noun phrases (see above). Many words that serve as determiners can
also be used as pronouns (this, that, many, etc.)

Determiners can be used in certain combinations, such as all the water and the many problems.

3. Pronouns
Stand in for a noun.
Provide relief / variety: Instead of, ‘Brendan did this’, ‘Brendan did that’,’ Brendan blah blah blah.’

4. Verbs
Verbs are doing, being, or having words. Verbs are the second largest word class after nouns.

Every sentence, except for commands and other rare cases such as dialog, needs to have both a verb and a
subject in order to make sense.

Generally speaking, the shortest possible sentence (other than commands, dialog, etc) is made up of two words:
a subject and a verb: “Brendan studies”

Regular & Irregular Verbs

Regular verbs are those verbs whose past-tense version is formed by adding –ed.

talk talked
smile smiled
ask asked

Irregular verbs are those verbs whose past tense does not follow the above rule.
There is no rule to follow; irregular verbs must be learned individually. There are roughly 200 irregular verbs. A
few examples:
Speak spoke
Blow blew
Sit sat
Be was
Bend bent

Finite & non-finite verbs

Finite verbs
 Have a subject (expressed or implied)
 Can function as the root of an independent clause;
 an independent clause can, in turn, stand alone as a complete sentence.

A finite verb gives meaning to a sentence; a sentence does not make any sense without a finite verb.

Finite means ‘bound’. Finite verbs must agree with the number and person of their subject.
I love studying (love = finite verb, I = subject; the finite verb love agrees with the subject I)

Kevin loves food (loves = finite verb, Kevin=subject; the finite verb loves agrees with the
subject Kevin)

If the tense of the sentence changes, then the form of the finite verb also changes.

I loved studying

Examples
(The finite verbs are in bold in the following sentences, and the non-finite verbs are underlined):

This sentence is illustrating finite and non-finite verbs.

The dog will have been trained well.
Tom promises to try to do the work.

There can be just one finite verb at the root of each clause (unless the finite verbs are coordinated), whereas the
number of non-finite verbs can reach up to five or six, or even more, e.g.

He was believed to have been told to have himself examined.

Finite verbs can appear in dependent clauses as well as independent ones:

John said that he enjoyed reading.

Something you make yourself seems better than something you buy.

Non-finite verbs
 Typically lack a subject
 Cannot serve as the root of an independent clause.
 Not bound by tense, person, or number of the subject
 Not bound by subject-verb agreement
 Are an extension of a sentence
 Can sometimes be left out; depending on the context, the sentence will still make sense without the
non-finite verb.

Richie hates working

Hates = finite verb

Working = non-finite verb

There are three kinds of non-finite verbs: infinitives, participles, and gerunds.

1. Infinitives
Infinitive is a grammatical term used to refer to certain verb forms that exist in many languages. As with many
linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages.

In traditional descriptions of English, the infinitive is the basic dictionary form of a verb when used non-finitely,
with or without the particle to. Thus to go is an infinitive, as is go in a sentence like "I must go there" (but not in
"I go there", where it is a finite verb). The form without to is called the bare infinitive, and the form with to is
called the full infinitive or to-infinitive.

2. Participles
A participle is a verb that does the work of both a verb and an adjective. Thus, it is a verbal adjective.
There are 3 forms of participle:

1. Present participles consist of the verb + -ing

Look at the burning candles.

Burning acts as a verb, and also describes the noun candles.

2. Past participles consist of the verb + –d or -ed

Tired, he dropped to the floor.

3. Perfect participles consist of the verb having + -d or –ed or –en.

Having eaten his dinner, he went to sleep.

3. Gerunds
Like the present (continuous) participle, a gerund also ends in –ing. But a gerund acts as a verb and a noun. So
it is called a verbal noun.

I stopped smoking
I love eating tomatoes
I don’t mind washing up

Like love hate mind prefer start stop finish recommend suggest
Gerund to + infinitive

5. Adjectives
Adjectives modify nouns, or relate to nouns.

They do so by answering one of three questions:

Which one? The big combo The and big = adj)
What kind of? The growing crisis The and growing = adj
How many? Five measly dollars Five and measly = adj

6. Adverbs
Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.

Adverbs tend to answer the following questions:

Why?
How? It is barely running. (Is running is the verb)
She drives really fast (Drives is the verb)
When? It rained yesterday.
Where?

7. Prepositions

8. Conjunctions

9. Interjections
1.2 Rules of Grammar
Subject-verb agreement
 When the subject is composed of two or more nouns or pronouns connected by and, use a plural verb.
Jack and Jill are kissing.

 When two or more singular nouns or pronouns are connected by or / nor, use a singular verb.
Arrogance or hubris is not a good trait to take into politics

 When a compound subject contains both a singular and a plural noun or pronoun joined by or / nor,
the verb agrees with the part of the subject that is nearer the verb.
The boy or his friends run every day

 Doesn’t / Don’t
Doesn’t is a contraction of ‘does not’ and should only be used with a singular subject.
Don’t is a contraction of ‘do not’ and should only be used with a plural subject.
He doesn’t like it.
They don’t like it.

There is an exception for the first and second person pronouns I and you, which use don’t.

I don’t know.
You don’t know anything man.

 Don’t be misled by a phrase that comes between the subject and the verb. The verb agrees with the
subject, not with anything in the phrase.
The people <who listen to that music> are few

Subject phrase verb

The people are few

 The following words are singular, and require a singular verb:

Each / Each one
Either / Neither
Everyone / Everybody
Anyone / Anybody
No one / Nobody
Someone / Somebody

Everyone is laughing
Neither is correct
Each one is necessary
Anyone is able to see that you are silly

 Nouns such as dollars, mathematics, measles, civics, and news are singular
The news is on at six
Mathematics is not as hard as it seems

 Dollars is a special case:

When talking about an amount of money, it requires a singular verb.

A million dollars is a lot of money man.

 When refereeing to dollars themselves, a plural verb is required.

Dollars are able to be exchanged for gold.

 Nouns such as scissors, tweezers, trousers, and shears require plural verbs (there are two parts to
these things).
The scissors are very sharp.

 Collective nouns are words that imply more than one person but that are considered singular and
take a single verb, such as group, team, committee, class, and family.
The team is ready
The family has a long history
The committee decides on these things

In some cases, a sentence may call for a plural when using a collective noun.

The crew are preparing to board the ship.

(This sentence is referring to the individual efforts of each team member).

 Expressions such as ‘with’, ‘together’, ‘including’, ‘accompanied by’, ‘in addition to’, and ‘as well’,
do not change the number of the subject. If the subject is singular, the verb is too.
The author, accompanied by his wife, is travelling to the conference.
All of the books, including yours, are in that box.

Parallel Structure
 The terms in a series are said to be parallel when they all belong to the same part of speech; each
member is a noun, verb, or adverb:

X She likes swimming, playing tennis, and to run marathons

(Swimming and tennis are nouns, to run marathons is an infinitive verb)

She likes to swim, play tennis, and run marathons. (Each item is a verb)

She likes swimming, playing tennis, and running marathons. (Each item is a noun)

 Parallelism does not require the items to be identical in length or structure.

She spent her vacation reading, writing letters in German, and lying on the beach.

The documents must be checked for spelling, pronunciation, and correct use of abbreviations.

 A parallel structure that begins with clauses must keep on with clauses. Changing to another pattern
or changing the voice of the verb (active / passive), will break the parallelism.
X The coach told the players that they should get a lot of sleep, that they should not eat too
much, and to do some warm-up exercises before the game.

The coach told the players that they should get a lot of sleep, that they should not eat too much, and
that they should do some warm up exercises before the game.

 Parallelism must also be maintained when composing lists following a colon. Each item in the list
must be the same grammatical form.
X The dictionary can be used for these purposes: to find word meanings, pronunciations,
correct spellings, and looking up irregular verbs.
 The dictionary can be used for these purposes: to find word meanings, pronunciations, correct
spellings, and irregular verbs.

 An article or a preposition applying to all the members of a series must either be used only before the
first term or else be repeated before each term.
These flowers bloom in spring, summer, or autumn.

These flowers bloom in spring, in summer, or in autumn.

Dangling Participles
Conditions that cause dangling participles:

 When a sentence begins with a clause that contains a participle (except absolute participles), and the
subsequent independent clause does not begin with the subject that is doing the action denoted by the
participle.
While writing the memo, the phone rang and interrupted me.

One fix is to provide the correct subject for ‘writing’ in the opening clause

While I was writing the memo…

Another way is to begin the independent clause with a subject capable of performing the writing:

While was writing the memo, I was interrupted by the phone ringing.

 When the independent clause begins with “there is” or “it is”
Relieved of responsibility of the project, there is no reason for us to delay the review.

Correct the subject in the first clause:

Now that we have been relieved of responsibility of the project, there is no reason for us to delay the
review.

Or rewrite the independent clause:

Relieved of responsibility of the project, we have no reason to…

 When the independent clause is headed by a verb:

Having been reprimanded for tardiness, buying a clock was her first priority.

The solution is to add a subject:

Having been reprimanded for tardiness, she made buying a clock her first priority.

 When the independent clause is in the passive voice:

Driving down the street, the Empire State Building was seen.

The solution is to change the passive construction into an active one:

Driving down the street, we saw the Empire State Building.

 Absolute participles pose an exception to the anti-dangling rules, because they lack a subject.
Given the limits of the plan, the alternative proposal seems practical.
 To tell if you’re dealing with an absolute participle, tack the dependent clause on at the end and see if it still
makes sense.

Based on her report, the panel approved the director’s request.

The panel approved the director’s request, based on her report.

Modifying Phrases
 A similar stricture exists against sentences that begin with modifying phrases.
X Unlike meat and poultry, the government does not inspect fish.

Solution: Unlike meat and poultry, fish is not inspected by the government.

Solution: Fish, unlike meat and poultry, is not inspected by the government.
(Awkward – double negative)

 Modifying phrases are not always placed at the head of a sentence.

X This novel is a haunting tale of deception, by one of New Zealand’s finest authors.

The common modifier that causes the most problems is only. The general rule is to place only directly
before the noun, adjective, or verb it is to modify.

Only Soundgarden tries to play that way

Soundgarden only tries to play that way
Soundgarden tries to only play that way

This general rule however must yield to idiomatic expression:

I can only try to explain the problem.

She only thought she was being helpful.
Your offer can only be called an insult.

Also, the meaning of a sentence changes when only comes in the final position.

Soundgarden played only yesterday vs Soundgarden played yesterday only.

SECTION 2: PUNCTUATION
Using Punctuation for emphasis
Parentheses Soft voice; an aside, digressions, explanations
Commas More stress and closer integration with the text
Dashes A more abrupt break

Ideally a combination should be used.

Apostrophes
Apostrophes serve three uses:
 To show the possessive of nouns
 To show the omission of letters
 To indicate plurals of certain lower case letters

1. Possessive apostrophes
To determine whether you need to make a possessive, turn the phrase around and make it an “of the…”
phrase; if you can, it is.

The boy’s hat The hat of the boy

Three days’ journey Journey of three days

 Add ‘s to the singular form of the word (even if it ends in s)

The guitarist’s pick
James’s hat

 Add ‘s to plural forms that don’t end in s

The children’s game

 Add ‘ to the end of plural nouns that end in s

Houses’ roofs
Three friends’ letters

 Use an apostrophe alone after singular nouns ending in an s or z sound (sibilant) and combined with
‘sake’
For goodness’ sake
For appearance’ sake
For conscience’ sake

 In compound words and ‘of’ phrases, use ‘s after the last noun
My sister-in-law’s dog
The King of England’s car

 In compound words and phrases, add ‘ after the last noun when it is plural
A man of letters’ erudition
The Queen of the Netherlands’ castle
The Auckland Warriors’ best season

 Add ‘s to the last noun to show to show joint possession of an object

Chris and Kim’s band
Bert and Ernie’s song
 Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns hers, its, ours, yours, theirs

 Use ‘s after non-classical personal names ending in a sibilant (an s or z sound)

Charles’s James’s
Collins’s Tobias’s

 Use an apostrophe alone after classical names ending in s or z

Xerxes’ Venus’
Mars’ Socrates’

 Don’t use an apostrophe in the names of wars known by their length

The Hundred Years War The Seven Years War

 When words, letters or symbols are referred to as objects, rather than their meaning – italicize or set
in quotes, with the s outside any closing quote.
Common sense and context determine which style to use and whether it is necessary; complicated text may
require a combination.

Dos and don’ts

The ‘dt’s
Too many whicess in that sentence
Four ‘X’s on the label
‘a’s, ‘e’s, ‘i’s, ‘o’s, and ‘u’s

 When an abbreviation functions as a verb, use a ‘ to splice a suffix

KO’d
OK’d
SOS’ing

2. Omission of letters
Very straightforward.

3. Plurals of lowercase letters

Mind your p’s and q’s

There is no need for apostrophes indicating plural on capitals, numbers, and symbols:

There are two G4s in the computer room

That page has too many &s on it
The 1970s were awesome
Commas
 Compound sentence (two independent clauses joined by a conjunction)
Coordinating conjunction - and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet. Links two independent clauses.
Use a comma, unless the clauses are very short and closely linked.

I went out jogging yesterday, and I saw a duck.

Tim played the guitar and Betty sang.

 Compound predicate (one subject governing two verbs)

Use a comma between the subject and the second verb only if needed for clarity and emphasis.

Proofreaders must understand type specs and should learn to detect differences in spacing.

(Proofreaders is the subject, must understand and should learn are the verbs.)

Proofreaders must understand type specs and production and time constraints, and should learn
to detect differences in spacing.

 Dependent clause followed by an independent clause – use a comma

If the minimum wage is not increased, the purchasing power of low income earners will continue
to decrease.

 Independent clause followed by dependent clause

 If the dependent clause is restrictive, do not use a comma

The sandwich that Greg ate for lunch had too many pickles.

 The word that generally indicates a restrictive clause

 Restrictive clauses are needed for the sentence to make sense.

 If the dependent clause is nonrestrictive, use a comma

The sandwich, which had too many pickles, got eaten by the family dog.

 A nonrestrictive clause is a descriptive phrase that is not necessary to the sentence; if it is

removed, the sentence still makes sense.
 The word which traditionally signals a nonrestrictive clause
 Commas frame nonrestrictive clauses

 (See note on which vs that at the end of the this section.)

 Essentially, if the information is important to the sentence’s meaning, don’t put commas
around it; if you can leave the information out and the meaning is still intact, put commas
around it.
 Introductory phrase that continues a participle - set off the phrase with a comma
Before reading the paper, I ate breakfast.

Having finished reading the paper, I sat down to work

 Sentence adverbs – use a comma
Unfortunately, the results will not be in for another six weeks.

 Transitional adverbs - set off with a comma

However, the schedule is very tight

The schedule, however, is very tight
Thus, only one conclusion is available

When the transition is not abrupt and no emphasis is desired, no punctuation is needed:

Thus the problem was resolved.

 Interrupter
Brendan, to his credit, works very hard.

 Series of parallel items

Use commas to separate items in a list or series:

Bring lawyers, guns, and ammo.

A driver’s license, passport, or other form of ID is required.

That last comma, known as the serial comma, Oxford comma, or Harvard comma, causes serious
controversy. Although many consider it unnecessary, others, including Business Insider, insist on its use to
reduce ambiguity.

Note: The Oxford Style Manual prefers the serial comma.

Note: There is usually no need to use commas when items in a list are connected with conjunctions such as
or and and.

Only use the serial comma when there are three or more items in the list.

There's an Internet meme that demonstrates its necessity perfectly. The sentence, "We invited the strippers,
JFK, and Stalin," means the speaker sent three separate invitations: one to some strippers, one to JFK, and
one to Stalin. The version without the Oxford comma, however, takes on an entirely different meaning,
potentially suggesting that only one invitation was sent - to two strippers named JFK and Stalin. Witness:
"We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin."

 Pair or series of adjectives

She gave a warm, constructive speech to a warm, appreciative, well-informed audience.

 Adjectives that modify the same noun (coordinate adjectives)

Use a comma for coordinate adjectives. Two adjectives are coordinate if you can answer yes to both of
these questions:

1. Does the sentence still make sense if you reverse the order of the words?
2. Does the sentence still make sense if you insert "and" between the words?

A long, tedious planning session. (long and tedious are both adjectives)
A long and tedious planning session (works fine)
 A tedious and long planning session (works fine)

Therefore the adjectives are coordinate, and a comma is required.

Sentences with non-coordinate adjectives, however, don't require a comma. For example, "I lay under the
powerful summer sun." "Powerful" describes "summer sun" as a whole phrase. This often occurs with
adjunct nouns, a phrase where a noun acts as an adjective describing another noun - like "chicken soup" or
"dance club."

 Direct address – set off the addressee with a comma

‘Doctor, your next patient is here.’
‘Angela, you come here this instant.’
‘Let’s eat, Bob.’

 Direct quotation - use a comma to separate the quotation from the speaker tag
I said, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Let’s go,’ I said.

 Separate interdependent clauses by a comma, unless they are very short

The fewer the complaints, the faster the project will be completed.
The more the merrier.

 Dates
Use a comma to separate the date from the year.

Also use a comma to separate the elements in a full date (weekday, month and day, and year). Also separate
a combination of those elements from the rest of the sentence with commas.

March 15, 2013, was a strange day.

Even if you add a weekday, keep the comma after "2013."

Friday, March 15, 2013, was a strange day.

Friday, March 15, was a strange day.

You don't need to add a comma when the sentence mentions only the month and year.

March 2013 was a strange month.

 Etc
Etc is traditionally preceded and followed by a comma unless it’s the final word in a sentence. Some writers
will omit the comma after etc.
When not to use a comma
 Comma splices
Do not use a comma to join two independent clauses; this is called a comma splice.

We went to the beach, however it was raining.

Correct by changing the comma to a semi-colon, or splitting the splice into two sentences.

 Before an indirect quotation

Management asked for a full report.

 After a that that precedes a quotation

His resume states that he has ‘extensive international consulting experience.’

 Do not allow a comma to interrupt a so…that construction

The upcoming period is so busy that no leave will be approved.

Semicolons
Semicolons either
1 Separate two complete sentences, or
2 Separate items in a list that contain internal punctuation

Never use a semicolon to introduce a list

Colons tend to serve as an introduction to whatever follows them.

Hyphens
Punctuation Example How to create in MS Word
Hyphen Blah-blah Word-hyphen-word
En Dash Blah – blah word-space-hyphen-space-word (or alt + 0150)
Em Dash Blah—blah word-space-hyphen-hyphen-space-word (or alt + 0151)

A soft hyphen appears at the end of a line of text to indicate that a word is continued on the next line.

A hard hyphen is used to join certain compound words.

Compound Words
 Open compound
Written as two words: high school, near miss, common sense.

 Hyphenated compound
Half-life, self-confidence

 Solid compound
Schoolteacher, headache, textbook

The hyphenation of compound words changes over time. New compounds tend to appear as open or hyphenated
compounds; if the term gains currency, the term becomes solid.

The treatment of some compounds is fixed, but with many others it is determined by the grammatical context.
For fixed-meaning compounds, use the dictionary or a style manual.
Example
Problem solving
as a noun engage in problem solving
as an adjective before a noun problem-solving approach

Most compound modifiers that precede a noun are hyphenated, whereas those that follow it are open.

Wired Style: ‘When in doubt, close it up:’

Online
Email
Barcode
Homepage
Pulldown
Screensaver

Background: Compound Adjectives

Attributive compounds – precede the noun they modify a big, shiny apple
Predicate compounds – follow the noun they modify the apple is big and shiny

When an attributive compound is two words or longer, the possibility of misreading arises.

 Two-word attributive compounds are usually hyphenated.

Low-rent district
Working-class man
Tax-free earnings
Hot-water faucet

…however there are three exceptions:

Exception 1: common open compound nouns

Only use hyphens to avoid ambiguity:

Income tax refund

Real estate transaction
Post office regulations

Exception 2: when the first member of the compound adjective is an adverb ending in
-ly, the compound is open

Highly levered investment

Openly hostile attitude

Exception 3: adjectives derived from foreign languages are not hyphenated unless the
term is hyphenated in its original language

A la carte menu
Per capita consumption
Papier-mache construction

 Phrases used as adjectives

Adjectives that consist of short common phrases are hyphenated when used attributively:

Off-the-record remark
 Over-the-counter drugs
Spur-of-the-moment decision
Black-and-white photographs

 Adjectives of quantity
Compound adjectives that consist of a number and a unit of measurement are hyphenated:

A 200-pound man
A one-word reply
A nineteenth-century painting

 Suspended compound adjectives

A space follows the hyphen:

Right- or left-handed users

Micro- and macroeconomics

Note1: First-, second-, and third-graders

(in a series, no space before the comma)

Note2: 10-to-15-minute traffic delay

the ‘10-to-15’ constitutes a unit, and is therefore not a suspended compound

 Compound nouns
There are few if any rules; check the dictionary.

e.g. crossbones, cross-purpose, cross section

 Prefixes and suffixes

Most words formed with common prefixes (anti-, bi-, mid-, multi-, non-, over-, post-, pre-, sub-, over-, un-,
under-), and suffixes (-fold, -less, -like) are usually closed up, unless the closed form would create
ambiguity.

anti-intellectual, semi-independent to avoid a double i

de-emphasize, de-escalate, de-ice to avoid a double e
un-ionized (as distinct from unionized)
pro-democracy, pro-life, pro-choice

Compounds consisting of a prefix and a hyphenated term are hyphenated:

Non-English-speaking students
Un-air-conditioned car

Compounds consisting of a prefix and a proper noun or a proper adjective are hyphenated:

anti-American sentiment
in mid-July

The En Dash (or en rule)

So named because it is about the width of the letter n.

 Replaces the hyphen in compound terms where one element of the compound is itself a hyphenated
or open (nonhyphenated) 2- or 3-word element
 San Francisco–based writer
Post–Word War II

In compound adjectives formed by attaching a prefix to a hyphenated element, however, a hyphen is used:

Semi-labour-intensive

 Used as a substitute for the word through (or to) in a range of inclusive numbers or months

Pages 140–155
January–April

Note: ‘the May-June issue of Jabberwocky’ gets a hyphen because it is not a range.

 Used to show an association between words that retain their separate identities

The Asia–Pacific region

A parent–child relationship

Note: when the en rule is used this way, the things it links must be parallel in structure; numbers should be
linked with numbers, nouns with nouns, adjectives with adjectives etc.

Australian–Japanese research teams, not Australia–Japanese research teams

The em dash (or em rule)

 Amplifying or explaining

An em dash or a pair of em dashes sets off an amplifying or explaining rule:

My friends—that is, my former friends—ganged up on me.

She outlined the strategy—a strategy that she hoped would unity the opposing sides.

 Separating a subject from a pronoun

Darkness, thunder, a sudden scream—nothing alarmed the child
Consensus—that elusive, ever sought-after thing.

 Indicating sudden breaks

A sudden break in thought or sentence structure:

“Will he—can he—obtain the signatures?” asked Bill.

Ellipses can serve the same purpose.

If the break belongs to the surrounding sentence rather than to the quoted material, the em dashes must
appear outside the quotation marks:

‘Someday he’s going to hit one of those long shots, and’—his voice turned huffy—‘I won’t be
there to see it.’

 With other punctuation

A question mark or an exclamation point—but never a comma, a colon, or a semicolon, and rarely a period
—may precede an em dash.

 2-em rule
 When creating a bibliography, most style guides require that ‘when using more than one work by an author
or authoring body is listed in a reference list or bibliography, a 2-em rule can be used to avoid repeating the
name of the author or authoring body.

Quotations
British practice is normally to enclose quoted matter within single quotation marks, and to use double quotation
marks for a quotation within a quotation:

‘Have you any idea,’ he said, ‘what “Jabberwocky” is?’

—The Oxford Style Manual

The US style is often the opposite.

 Relative placing with other punctuation

British practice is according to the sense.

US practice is to place commas and full points within closing quotations regardless of whether they are part
of the quoted material.

When the punctuation mark is not part of the quoted material, place it outside the closing quotation mark.

Why does he use the word ‘poison’?

Boldly I cried out, ‘Woe unto this City!’
‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures?’

GDID 701: PROFESSIONAL WRITING AND EDITING

Week 1: Introduction
Those who have knowledge <-> Information Designers <-> Those who need it
(Translators / boundary spanners)

Information Design Organisations

 NZ - Technical Communicators Association of NZ (TCANZ)
http://www.tcanz.org.nz/
Established 1997 as NZ Technical Writers Association (NZTWA)
Renamed TCANZ in 2002
Student membership $57.00 (photocopy of course required)

 US - Society of Technical Communicators (STC)

The US Body
Publishes ‘Technical Communication’
  UK - Information Design Society
The UK Body
Produces ‘Information Design Journal’

One of the most important traits a writer needs is adaptability.

Employment for technical writers expected to grow at 18% from 2008 – 2012 (US).

History of Information Design

William Playfair
Lived at the time of the American Revolution – created new graphs and charts

Florence Nightingale
Invented new types of statistical graphs.

Technical Writing Genres

 Studies  Reports - proposals, scientific reports, government reports,
 Memos progress reports, feasibility
 E-Mail  Training Manuals
 System documentation  e-Learning
 Policies & procedures  Software Help Notes
 Web design  User Guides
 Intranet design  Business Process Mapping (BPM)
 Knowledge Management

Week 2: The Writing Process

Writing is a process, meaning it can be taught and learned. However, the process is unique for each writer; there
is no set way to write that works for every writer.

Step 1 Define Rhetorical Context

Think about:
 Genre
 Time constraints
 Audience
o What do they already know
o What do they need to know
o Is there a secondary / tertiary audience
o What level of writing is appropriate for my audience
 Purpose
o To inform
o Specific outcome e.g. teach a skill or procedure
o To persuade

Step 2 Prewriting / Drafting

How do you come up with a first draft?

 Brainstorming – alone or in a group

  Clustering (mapping, logical mapping)
o Non-linear
o Free association
o Graphical aids – bubble maps

 Listing / bulleting
Similar to clustering – write down one or multiple bullet-point lists of items.

 Freewriting
Force yourself to write, with no concern given to syntax, grammar etc.
The only concern is to keep writing, with the idea that what you produce will be useful in some way
when you have finished.

 Formal outline
Start with your thesis statement:

Thesis statement: A central idea that declares the central idea of your document.

Then write at least three supporting points for the thesis statement. Under each point, list the supporting
evidence or facts.

The thesis statement should express an opinion, rather than just being a statement of fact. It is next
to impossible to write supporting arguments for statements of fact. This can be hard to do in technical
writing. Consider however:

“The company would like you to print two-sided to save costs”, as opposed to “here is how to use the
printer.”

Always refer back to your thesis statement to make sure you are staying on track. It serves as a
guidepost, to prevent you from going off on tangents. Ask yourself – “does this sentence / paragraph /
idea further my thesis statement?” If so – how, and does it do it adequately?

 Self-education / heuristics
Interview yourself – ask yourself questions to determine what you know, and what you don’t
know. Use basic journalistic questions:
 Who
 What
 When
 Where
 Why
 How

Some of these questions may already have been answered when you determined your rhetorical context.

Step 3 / 4 Review / revise

Review / revise – iteratively, and sequentially in levels.

1 Document as a whole
Do the paragraphs follow each other logically?
Does the document flow logically?
Compare against the thesis statement.

2 More focused problems

Sentence constructions (too wordy / confusing?)
Overused phrases?

3 Proofreading
Spelling
Punctuation
Grammar
Print it out, and read it aloud – it helps!
Week 3: Principles of Good Writing
The three Cs:
 Clear (Clarity)
 Concise (Concision)
 Correct (Correctness)

Very useful for job interviews in writing / digital.

(You could add a 4th – cohesion – does the writing ‘hang together’ and serve its purpose).

Clarity
Use familiar words whenever possible (don’t use fancy words)
Resist the temptation to show off or try to show that you are ‘one of the club’

abate drop / decrease

cognizant aware
demonstrate show
multitudinous many
obviate prevent / do away with
salient important
utilize use
wherewithal means

Use appropriate sentence length

Vary sentence length – too many short sentences sound staccato, too many long sentences are confusing.

The guiding principle is whether the sentence accurately expresses an idea with a minimum of words. For
example:

There is a direct line that connects us with the Seattle office

A direct line connects us with the Seattle office.

Avoid unnecessary words

The month of October
The city of Christchurch

There are three trusses that the beam rests onvs The beam rests on three trusses

It seems obvious that we must meet the deadline vs Obviously, we must meet the deadline

Prefer the active voice to the passive

Active voice someone or something DOES something

Passive voice Something WAS DONE BY something

Passive voice can be used to avoid making any person or group directly responsible for something.
Concision
What is the appropriate length / syntax / voice / style – don’t just go with short for no reason.

The key is understanding how much writing is required for a given document / concept, and not going beyond
that.

Do not overwrite
Don’t force your reader to spend more effort that is necessary concentrating on how you’ve written, rather than
what you’ve written.

Do not overstate
Readers are inherently wary of hyperbole; it can destroy your credibility as a writer.

Avoid the use of qualifiers

 Rather
 Very
 Little
 Pretty

Rather and very in particular are rarely needed or recommended. They can convey an annoying, teenage tone.

Correctness
Correctness is writing does not necessarily lead to good writing. But without correctness, good writing is
impossible.

Just knowing about the rules or grammar and spelling will not make you a good writer – but not knowing them
can spotlight you as an amateur or careless writer.

Correctness establishes your credibility as a writer.

Theories of Writing
Product oriented writing
Writers produce documents that conform to conventions

Process-centered theory (mid 1960s)

Cognitive process theory

How does a writer produce a document?

Social Constructionist Theory

Human language can be understood only from the perspective of a social group, not an individual.
Writing is always a social act.
The Plain Language Movement
A reaction against confusing, obscure, ‘jargony’ corporate, government, medical, and legal writing.

No legislation exists in NZ to mandate Plain Language, however its adoption is spreading. Laws do exist in
some other countries. (Sweden has had legislation for 30 years).

Plain Language act of 2009 (US)

Requires documents that communicate information to the public to be written in clear language.
Federal employees must be trained to write clearly.

Australian Style Manual

Used by most Australian government agencies
 Use familiar, everyday words
 Be precise, avoiding unnecessary words
 Vary sentence length (with an average 22-word sentence length)
 Prefer the active voice over the passive
 Engage the audience by using personal pronouns (“you”)
 Use verbs in preference to nouns derived from verbs (such as impact)
 Break up dense strings of nouns and adjectives
 Avoid euphemisms, clichés, and overused words and phrases
 Prefer simple sentence frameworks
Week 4: Audience Analysis
General tips:

 Always be sure your reader knows the importance and significance of your document to them
 Make sure you have a strong introduction for the whole document – one that makes clear the topic, purpose,
audience, and contents of that document. Also use mini-introductions for each major section that give an
overview of the topics covered.
 Use graphics

Common audience categories:

 Expert / SME
 Technician
 Executive / decision maker / manager
 Nonspecialist

Experts
Usually have extensive background knowledge about the product and the field in general. Can be a difficult
audience to communicate with as they have advanced knowledge, but may not be adept at communicating that
knowledge to laypeople.
Often use documents in order to make a decision.

Technicians
Usually responsible for installing & maintaining a system / product. They will often have practical requirements
from documentation; how to perform a task, solve a problem, learn something in particular.

Executives
May not have a deep technical knowledge of a product, but they have a strong influence on it, as they control
budgets, production schedules, marketing and the like.

Non-specialists
Often the primary audience for technical writers.
They generally need a document in order to get something (practical) done.
Week 5: Persuasive Writing
Aristotle’s three artistic proofs, or methods of persuasion:

1 ETHOS
 Character / credentials of the author
 Good moral character, goodwill, good sense
 Trustworthiness
 Persona of the writer – register, tone – appropriate to the context
 Knowledge and expertise – this is important

2 LOGOS
 Logic, rational arguments
 Present numbers, data, information, reasoned proof, in order to convince the reader to act or believe in
a certain way
 Research is critical – must have compelling evidence
 Requires a document have a clear purpose
 Empirical evidence – first-hand observations and objective data
 Analogous evidence – similar contexts, to develop generalizations
 Anecdotal evidence – opinion, basically. Can be useful if it’s expert opinion
 Arguing from consequence
 Arguing from value
 Comparing options
 Citing authorities
 Countering objections

3 PATHOS
 Emotion

Persuasive Writing Techniques

 Talk like a person
Be polite
Be genuine

 Establish Credibility
Give detailed contact information
Show credible certifications and affiliations

 Use the right tone

Remind readers / customers about features, differentiators, and benefits
Boldly
Subtly

 Appeal to the left brain and the right brain (emotional / rational)

 Use numbers & statistics

 Use images, graphs, visual information, audio, speech

  Tell stories
The success of your brand / venture
Customer feedback

 Use metaphors

 Don’t use cheap tricks. They don’t work.

Neurolinguistic imperatives
Hard selling

 OMIT HEDGE WORDS

Likely, may, probably, possibly, suggest, approximately, might, perhaps

 Repetition
Don’t overdo it
Don’t overuse words and phrases

 FAQs build trust (websites)

IMRaD report writing method

Introduction / Methods / Results / and Discussion

 Chronological.
 Often weak and bloated.
 Inherently “I / we” – we did this, we think this etc. The user is not involved.

DSB report writing method

Definition
Explicitly state the problem being solved. DEFINE in terms of a problem to be solved.
Week 7: The Look of Writing
Visual clues help to form a logical hierarchy.

White space
 Imparts shape to a document
 Orients users
 Isolates, frames, and emphasizes important elements
 Provides breathing room between blocks of text

Tips for Headings

 Ordinarily, use no more than 4 levels of headings:
o Section, major topic, minor topic, subtopic
 Insert one additional line of space above each heading:
o For single-spaced text, double-space before the heading, and single space after
o For double-space text, triple-space before the heading, and double space after
 Never begin the sentence right after the heading with it, this, or some other pronoun referring to the
heading. Make the sentence’s meaning independent of the heading.
 Never leave a heading as the final line of a page. Unless two lines of text can fit beneath the heading,
carry it over to the top of the following page.

Fonts
 In general, it is recommended to use Sans Serif fonts for headings and subheadings, and serifed fonts
for body.
 Websites and screen-based writing often uses sans serif fonts

Underlining
 Not recommended to ever be used.
 In modern usage, underling generally indicates a hyperlink.
 Underlining also interferes with readability, by interfering with the descenders of letters.

Lists
 Obey parallelism – nouns, verbs, gerunds etc.
 Use bulleted lists when each item in the list is of equal importance
 Use numbered lists when you want to convey ranking, hierarchy, or a logical sequence of steps.
Week 8: Writing for the Web
Content is the most important part of a website. If the content doesn’t provide the information needed by users,
the website will provide little value no matter how easy it is to use the site.

Keep Content Brief

Most web users are seeking specific information, and want to be able to find it quickly and easily. Because there
is so much information available on the web, and because users typically don’t make an investment to visit a
website.

Thus, scannibility is important. Use chunking and headings.

Avoid constructing a sentence around a link phrase, such as Click here. Rather, write as you normally would
and then anchor the link on the words that best describe the additional info that’s being linked.

Bad: Click here for more information about how to blah blah.

Good: When writing for scannibility, it’s best to anchor your links on meaningful
phrases.

Writing for a Global Community

It’s often impossible to tell where your readers will be located, so in many cases you need to write for a global
audience.

Use short sentences and paragraphs

Avoid false subjects (for example avoid starting sentences with terms such as ‘it is’, and ‘there are’)

Try to avoid idioms

‘Just around the corner’
‘Tip of the iceberg’
Week 9: Introduction to Editing
The quality of the writing produced by an organization is as much a part of its image as its logo, public
presence, staff etc. We instinctively trust writing that appears professional, well written, literate, and geared
towards its audience.

A company’s information set is one of its most valuable assets.

Editors are often last hired and first hired: You can’t edit a manuscript that hasn’t been written.

Alternatives to specialist technical editing: Self-editing and peer-review.

Editorial Roles
Newspapers & Magazines
Editor-in-Chief Head Editor

Managing Editor Not always present – can go straight down to Associate Editors

Associate Editors Generally responsible for individual areas of editing – online

editor, print editor, news editor, science editor etc

Editorial Assistant Assists the above levels of editors

Copyeditor Performs low-level editing

Mechanics of writing – spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Books
Acquisition Editor Sources manuscripts, champions the author

Project / Production Editor Performs the detailed process of taking the work from manuscript
stage through to final. Requires a high degree of skill.

Copyeditor Mechanics of writing – spelling, grammar, style, factual accuracy

etc.
Levels of Technical Editing
1. Substantive / comprehensive editing
Reviewing the content, organization, and design of the information (the big picture).
Comprehensive / substantive editing is best done as early as possible, because substantive changes later
on are more likely to affect scheduling and create extra workload. Helps prevent double-handling, and
having to dispose of and re-do work.

Technical accuracy
Possibly the most important editing task, because it:
Helps sales (easy to read manuals sell more computers / software)
Helps avoid litigation
Making the product easy to use avoids product returns / aids customer
Retention

Reducing the amount of information

Users want to know enough to get the job done.
Action-oriented / task-oriented / user-oriented

Re-using information
A company’s information set is one of its most valuable assets.
Knowledge management enables software / content developers to meet shortening development cycles.
Creating topics, rather than books – mirroring the object-oriented, modular approach in object-oriented
programming.
Stripping the content of context assists re-use in multiple contexts.

2. Usability editing
Using & testing the content – quite similar to software usability testing in some respects. The editor
becomes the first user of the information.

3. Copyediting
Mechanics of writing – spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Note that all levels of editing involve content editing.

Editorial Responsibilities
For any editing job, an editor is responsible to, and an advocate for:

The audience
Follows the writer’s instructions and points out any issues (usability testing)
A second level of technical accuracy checking (after the writer)

The language
The technical editor copyedits at the sentence level for the three Cs, logical structure, completeness,
appropriateness,

The writer
Templates, style sheets, repeated text (e.g. single sourcing) – editors collaborate with the writers and other
members of the info. Design team, and advocate for the author. The editors job is to make the author’s / team’s
work look good.
The organization publishing the work
Adherence to company style, legal correctness, safety & security (liability issues), copyright, disclaimers,
correct use of product names & trademarks etc.
Comparison with Software Testing / Quality Assurance
Editors can be seen as quality assurance specialists – the same way software testers work hand-in-hand with
developers to make high quality code, editors work with writers to make high quality content. This is especially
true for validation testing.

Verification Testing
Reviewing requirement specs / design specs
Do the specifications match the customer’s requirements?

Validation Testing
Evaluating the software to make sure it meets the specifications.

 Low Level Validation Testing

Unit Testing
Testing individual components to make sure they meet the specifications

Integration Testing
Combining individual components of software to discover errors in the interfaces between the
components.

 High Level Validation Testing

Usability Testing
Accessibility, responsiveness, efficiency, comprehensibility (of software and documentation)

Function Testing
Discrepancies between the functional specs and the software – does it do what the specs say it should?

System Testing
Stress testing, security testing, performance testing, configuration testing, installation testing,
recoverability testing, reliability testing, serviceability testing
Week 10: Substantive editing
(Substantive editing / comprehensive editing / developmental editing / content editing)

Most substantive edits involve rewriting and / or restructuring.

Throughout the editing process it is important to maintain the writer’s voice (if appropriate).

There are no set rules in substantive editing (compared to copyediting), therefore it is the most difficult editing
phase.

Never point out a problem to a writer without offering a constructive solution for it.

Authors who need the most help tolerate editing the least.

The most important consideration at this stage is: who is the audience and how well does the document work for
them?

The 3-loop Method

1. The Contextual Loop
Purpose
Does the document state its purpose at the beginning?

Audience
As per week 4 lectures.

Genre
Proper use of genre conventions?

2. The Substantive Loop

Content
 Completeness
 Accuracy
 Legal / ethical issues
 Quoted material – has permission been sought?

Structure
 Does it flow logically?
 Chunked into logical paragraphs / sections?
 Is information clearly signposted?
 Is information organized logically from general to specific?

Tone
What form of address is used? Is it appropriate for the context?

3. The design & usability loop

 Layout, topography, colour, graphics
 Does the design match the purpose of the document?
 Do the graphics support the content?
 Does the typography support readability?
 Does the design aid navigation? (Especially important online).
Methods of organizing technical information
 Most important to least important
  Most commonly needed to least commonly needed
 Simple to complex
 Chronologically (stop-by-step)

Diplomacy in Editing Comments

Indirect comments are usually regarded as more polite.

The technical editor must be a diplomat as well as a language craftsman.

Advisor / collaborator / diplomat / collaborator vs authoritarian

Facilitator vs dictator

Give advice, constructive solutions to problems (perhaps several alternatives)

Balance directness with politeness (indirectness)

Remember, editors do not always want to change a writer’s text in a particular way

The length of the inferential path is critical in distinguishing directness from politeness:
I think we might rephrase this…
How does this sound…

Strategies
Direct strategies
 “Include a table in this section”
 Convey an obligation / imperative. Unambiguous.
 Shortest possible inferential path

1. Bald on-record strategy

Bald: unmitigated
On-record: explicitly stated

Are the clearest of all strategies, as they lack ambiguity.

Can be confronting, can be interpreted as ostentatious displays of the editors power / position / expertise.

Suggestions
 Mitigate bald on-record utterances with downgraders
 Combine bald on-record utterances with compliments
 Combine bald on-record utterances with payoff statements / justifications
 Otherwise avoid them unless the writer is “not getting it”

Downgraders
I think
Maybe
Possibly
You know
…okay?
You should just

2. Locution-derivable strategy (Active and passive voice)

 Longer inferential path – especially when passive voice is used
 Locution-derivable means that the inherent obligation of the underlying directive – the locution – can
be derived by the hearer.
 The obligation of the underlying directive is conveyed with a verb that conveys obligation – should,
will, or ought.
 Active voice: you should include a table
Passive voice: a table should be included

Suggestions
Avoid passive-voice locution-derivable utterances
Avoid unmitigated active-voice locution-derivable utterances
Use downgraders / downtoners
Use compliments
Use justifications / “payoffs”

3. Opinion Statement Strategy

I would use a table in this section
A very useful strategy

Conventionally Indirect strategies

Characterized by ambiguity in the intended force of an utterance

1. Preparatory Strategies (Active and Passive)

Refer to some condition that must be true in order for the hearer to be prepared to perform a directive.
The speaker conveys possibility rather than obligation – can, could

Suggestions:
Avoid preparatory strategies if the intent is to convey obligation
Reserve preparatory strategies if the intent is to convey possibility

2. Interrogative Strategy
Should do include a table?
Could you include a table?

Ambiguity in obligation vs possibility

Ambiguity in assertion of obligation and a real question

The editor suggests possibility, and also suggests that the writer should make the decision

Suggestions
Avoid interrogatives when obligation is intended
Reserve interrogatives for genuine enquiries
Nonconventionally Indirect Strategies (hints)
A graphical table aids comprehension vs Insert a table
This section has a lot of numerical data vs Insert a table

Longer inferential path, as they are subject to more interpretations

Strong Hints
An observation about a writer’s text, without a recommendation.

Weak Hints
Tend to be stated as general rules of writing: Graphic aids can help the reader understand data

Weak hints create the longest inferential path possible.

Some studies have shown that hints are regarded as less polite than conventionally indirect strategies.

Suggestions
Avoid hints, especially strong hints, which tend to be criticisms.
Week 11: Copyediting
The Copyeditor’s Handbook Amy Einsohn, 2000

Copyediting Areas
1. Mechanical Editing
 All editorial interventions made to conform to company style
 Spelling, punctuation, formatting / design (bold, italics etc)
 Headings, subheadings
 Tables, charts, graphs

2. Correlating Parts
Cross references
Footnotes, endnotes, tables, illustrations

3. Language Editing
Grammar, diction, usage
Important to retain the author’s style

4. Content Editing

5. Permissions
Week 12: Author Queries and Style Guides
Always include a query if you think a change would prove controversial.

If you have any doubt about how your change might affect meaning, you should put a query in the margin.

When To Query An Author

 Factual inconsistencies

 Points of fact about which you are sure that the manuscript is incorrect.

 Inconsistencies between the evidence presented and the author’s interpretation of that evidence.

 Inconsistencies between the manuscript and the accompanying diagrams, figures, or photos.

 Incomplete or missing footnotes, source notes, endnotes, or bibliographical sources.

It’s always a safe bet to phrase queries in terms of the reader.

Present queries in terms of suggestions for improvements.

Sensitive writers: use constructive criticism.

Style Guides
 Comprehensive Style Guide e.g. Chicago Manual of Style
 Discipline Style Guide e.g. Microsoft Manual of Style
 House Style Guide—relevant to a particular organization.

Comprehensive Style Guides

Style Guide Generally Used For
Chicago Manual of Style American English: (academic) books,
magazines
Associated Press Stylebook Newspapers

Oxford Manual of Style British English: (academic) books

American Psychological Association (APA) Science, Engineering

Modern Language Association (MLA) Arts, Humanities

Microsoft Manual of Style Technical, computing

AMA Style (American Medical Assoc.) Health industry

Wired Style Technical fields

Corporate Style Guides

 Promote an ethos of professionalism in communication
 Enable document consistency
 Serve as an effective training tool for new hires
 Set a policy for document creation within a company
  Save money by the above
 Professionalism and consistency present a positive image to clients

It’s important to get management buy-in to a style guide, which will then help ensure employee buy-in. If you
can’t, it’s still useful to collect personal style guidelines (including style guides that relate to particular projects,
documents, templates etc), and if management and the organization changes, you can look at implementing an
official style guide down the track.

 The New Oxford Style Manual

R. M. Ritter
Oxford University Press (OUP)

 Hart’s Rules (1894)

Became The Oxford Guide to Style (2002)

 The Oxford Style Manual (2003)

Combines:
The Oxford Guide to Style (2002) &
The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2000)

 The New Oxford Style Manual (2012)

GDID 702: PROFESSIONAL ISSUES IN
INFORMATION DESIGN
Week 1: Introduction
Communication
The art & science of successfully getting a message across

Learning to understand the needs and expectations of all parties involved in the communication process.

Technical communication
Strategies for solving problems

Early TCers (as they were then called) were primarily writers working on military specified documents. This
changed as computer gained precedence – computer companies employed writers to write ‘systems
documentation’ (as opposed to ‘user documentation’).

The advent of personal computers changed the entire landscape of the industry - user guides, reference manuals,
quick reference cards, tutorials, online help became the norm. This happened 30 years ago.

TCers eventually began to reorganize their documents to fit user paradigms; writing with a task oriented
approach. User Centered Design. (UCD)

User Centered Design

A design method that gathers information about users and tasks before they begin the product development
process, then evaluates the product with users as the product is under development, and repeats this process to
learn whether changes made improve the product as it moves through development.

Information Design—Definitions
Information design is a problem solving discipline that considers more than appearance but also the underlying
structure of the solution of a communication problem and its anticipated
reception by users
- Carliner (2000)

The translating of complex, unorganized, or unstructured data into valuable, meaningful information.

The practice of information design requires an interdisciplinary approach combining skills in areas including
graphic design, writing and editing, instructional design, human performance technology, and human factors.
- STC definition of Information Design
The process of organizing information and presenting it in whatever format makes it most meaningful to the
user
- Nathan Shedrof
What we need is not more information but the ability to present the right information to the right people at the
right time, in the most effective and efficient form.
- Robert Horn

Good information design is like an uneventuful airline flight.

- Kim Baer, 2008

Technical Communication -> Information Design

Technical communicators are now most likely to be a communication professional first, and a technology expert
second.

Making documentation, tools and applications more usable is a growth area, and largely where information
design is headed.

The skills practitioners need to complete projects have broadened from traditional competencies such as writing
and editing, to document project management, single sourcing, research techniques, usability testing, document
design, and business acumen.

 Technical writing
 Business Process Engineering
 Technical editing
 User-interface design
 Information architecture
 Market analysis
 Document production
 Graphic design
 Product management
 Web design
 Usability testing and user experience
 Audience / user task analysis

The graphic design approach still dominates ID today (Reynolds)

Over the past 20 years, the ability to communicate clearly to non-experts using a variety of media and
information types has emerged as the hallmark of technical communication excellence
- Hayhoe, (2000)
Consultants’ roles are generally broader than those employed by organizations (such as business analysis):
 Be able to perform a needs analysis
 Set business and performance objectives for a communication project
 Develop and conduct usability evaluations and assessments
 Develop user-centered designs
 Choose among media and genres of communication products
 Design interactions, screens, and content

The need for empathy with the user was consistently seen as the most essential skill that a technical
communicator could have (Reynolds)

Ability to communicate with all stakeholders in the document process is critical.

 Highly organized
 Confident
 Quick learner
 Good at interviewing
 Flexible to meet changing needs
Characteristics of a technical document
 Addresses particular readers
 Helps readers solve problems
 Is produced collaboratively
 Uses design to increase readability
 Consists of words or images or both

Measures of excellence in technical communication

 Honesty
 Clarity
 Accuracy
 Comprehensiveness
 Accessibility
 Conciseness
 Professional Appearance
 Correctness
Week 2: What is Information Design?
Clarity
The most important goal of effective communication is clarity. Clarity is not the same
as simplicity. Richard Saul Wurman taught me this well.

Simple things are clear if the message is intended to be brief and small, but often the message is about a
complex relationship that can only be presented with a necessarily large amount of data. This complexity can
be made clear through effective organization and presentation and need not be reduced to meaningless, “bite-
sized” chunks of data.

Clarity includes the focus on one particular message or goal at a time, rather than an attempt to accomplish too
much at once. Simplicity is often responsible for the “dumbing” of information rather than the illumination of
it.

From ‘Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design

DIKW Model (Saul Wurman)

Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom

As information designers, we need to resist the temptation to just translate data from one language (technical)
to another (the user’s). Instead, we need to focus on developing information relationships with our users and
creating information experiences that can allow our users to build local or personal context around data, and
therefore develop knowledge and possibly wisdom from it.
- 702 Week 2 lecture

High quality information design communicates information in a manner appropriate and pertinent to a reader’s
situational context. It must focus on the reader and ensure that he or she can clearly extract the information
needed to accomplish the real-world goal which sent them searching for information.

People simply cannot efficiently sort through and process the amount of information they have access to;
information overload has become a major problem. To reach the answer, they need content properly positioned
with the problem’s context and effectively assembled and presented.
- Michael J. Albers – Getting a Grip on Information Complexity

Information design communicates content to the reader. Information designers bring together prose, graphics,
and typography and make them work in unison to achieve the desired effect.

Any design lives and dies by the content is has to impart.

Mark Twain declared that it takes three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

The hard part for the information designer is making the design disappear. Rather than being something the
reader focuses on, the design must carry the information to the reader in a clear manner while remaining out of
sight. In a good design, readers can effortlessly extract the information they need without being conscious of
how they gain the information.

Many different elements come into play for an information designer, but knowing about each of them does not
constitute being an information designer any more than knowing how to use hand and power tools constitutes
knowing how to build a house. The tool knowledge may exist, but does the person possess the contextual
knowledge of how to properly apply them to the situation?

Rather than tool knowledge, the essence of being a good information designer is one of understanding the
following:

 Which questions to ask a client, SME, and user

 How to listen to the answers
 How to differentiate between the client’s wants and needs
 How to understand the information needs within the situational context
 How to translate the needs into results

.rather, they start with the information needs of the user and what data is available. The medium used to
communicate the message should not be chosen until the information needs of the audience are defined.

“to the user, the interface is the system”

Week 13: Localization
Localization
Localization is the process of adapting a product for a specific local audience.It includes cultural, technical, and
linguistic aspects.

General localization
Addresses superficial cultural differences like language, currency, and date and time formats.

Radical localization
Focuses on more substantive cultural differences that affect how readers and users think, feel, and act, including
learning approaches.

Advantages
Increased sales.
Localization is a form of marketing. It makes documents and products more applicable to a
transnational audience.

Overcoming cultural differences

Overcoming product resistance

Disadvantages
Localization can be expensive, time consuming, and legally complicated.

Internationalization
Internationalization is the process of writing, rewriting, designing and redesigning an information product so
that it can be easily localized to any transnational audience. Internationalization could be considered the
opposite of localization.

A document that has been internationalized consists of two components:

Core information is generic information that can be reused. It is the constant between various documents.

International variables are the culturally sensitive parts of the information that need to be localized.

Internationalization requires at least two central steps: Internationalization of the document, and then
localization of the transnational document for each local context.

Variables would include specific details about cultural issues such as:

 Political
 Economic
 Social
 Religious
 Educational
 Linguistic
 Technological

Identifying core information helps eliminate cultural bias and reduce the costs of localization.

Globalization
Globalization is now a popular term that is used universally, mostly with negative connotations.
Critics:
…the worldwide drive toward a globalized economic system dominated by supranational corporate trade and
banking institutions that are not accountable to democratic processes or national governments

Rather than freeing up the ways in which culture, knowledge, and information is accessed and utilized,
globalization demands conformity to essentially Western corporate paradigms. Globalization is the flattening
out of cultural differences, the collapsing of cultural specificities, an the diminishing of national or cultural
identities under the juggernaut of transnational corporate authority.

Hoft says globalization is simply the process of creating a product that can be used successfully in many cultural
contexts without modification. For writers working with transnational target audiences, the ultimate goal is
developing the global document for each document they must produce, a single document that can be ready and
understood by any audience. A truly global document is likely not a possibility. Globalization then should be
thought of as the process of preparing documents that can be read and understood by as many transnational
audiences as possible without modification.

One way that many workplace writers try to achieve global documents is by increasing the use of visual
representations.

Methods for writing documents to facilitate easy translation

Translation can be one of the most expensive aspects of transnational communication. Thus, the responsibility
of most technical writers isn’t to be able to translate their documents into various languages, but to prepare their
documents in ways that accommodate translation.

Because most TCers don’t have the background or skills to serve as translators, and most companies can’t afford
to purchase machine translation software, most companies when working with translational documents
outsource the translations.

1. Terminology
Most specialized terms don’t translate directly. One good method is to maintain a glossary of specialized terms.,
jargon, and new words. These glossaries can be given to translators as a resource to better understand how to
use specialized terminology.

2. Clarity
Idioms, acronyms, synonyms, word shifts, adjective phrases, gerunds, shifts in person, dropping that as a
conjunction (lack of clarity) can lend to ambiguities that are difficult for translators to work with.

3. Cultural and Rhetorical Differences

Using idiomatic phrases, popular culture references, and even humour, can be problematic for translators.

It is generally a good principle to avoid humor in all professional documents, as one can never be certain how
an audience will respond to it.

4. Design
Most languages require 30% more space than does English to convey the same message.

Glocalization
A phrase coined by combining globalization and localization meaning ‘thinking globally and acting locally’.

Coined in response to the phenomenon of local cultures connected through that universal melting pot, the
internet.

It is difficult to design or write a truly global information product. Visuals are one way that writers attempt to
achieve global documents.
Transnational audience analysis
Factors to consider with audiences from another country:
 Language
 Technology (access to technology, machine learning)
 Education (literacy, learning style, common body of knowledge)
 Politics
 Law
 Economics
 Society
 Religion
GDID 703: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Week 1: Introduction
Goal for 703
To enable students to analyse and plan for the information management needs of organizations, and to manage
documentation projects to meet specific information design needs.

703 Focus
 Information Management
 Content Management
 Project Management

Information management is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the
distribution of that information to one or more audiences…
- Wiki article on IM

Information, as we know it today, includes both electronic and physical information. The organizational
structure must be capable of managing this information throughout the information lifecycle regardless of
source or format (data, paper documents, electronic documents, audio, social business, video etc.) for delivery
through multiple channels that may include cell phones and web interfaces.

Given these criteria, we can then say that the focus of IM is the ability of organizations to capture, manage,
preserve, store and deliver the right information to the right people at the right time.
- AIIM

Records management -> Information Management -> Content Management /

Intelligent content
Twentieth century thru 1970s 1990s 2000s

The question of what we should collect, manage, and publish is more fundamental than the question of how.
- Bob Boiko

A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating
consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content
on demand to meet customers’ needs. A unified content strategy can help organizations avoid the content silo
trap.
- Managing Enterprise Content, a Unified Content Strategy (Chapter 1)

By failing to investigate thoroughly the customer’s need for information, we are likely to spend a great deal of
time and effort creating a structured Information Model for content that is needed by no one.
- JoAnn Hackos
Effects of Content Silos
 Higher cost of content creation and management
 Duplication of effort
 Poor communication
 Reduced awareness of other initiatives
 Lack of consistency and standardization
 Customers suffer
A unified content strategy results in
 Faster time-to-market
 Better use of resources
 Reduced costs
 Increased quality and consistency
 Reconfigurable
 Multidevice delivery
- Managing Enterprise Content, a Unified Content Strategy (Chapter 1)

Intelligent content is content that is structurally rich and semantically categorized, and is therefore
automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.
- Managing Enterprise Content, a Unified Content Strategy (Chapter 1)

Intelligent Content is
 Structurally Rich
Structure is the hierarchical order in which content occurs in an information product.

 Semantically Categorized
Content that has been identified as ‘meaning something’ and is related to other similar content. This is done by
applying metadata to the content.

 Automatically Discoverable
 Reusable
 Reconfigurable
 Adaptable
Week 2: The Information Lifecycle
Record
A record is recorded information arising from the transaction of business and kept as evidence of such activity.

Document
A document is a structured unit of recorded information, published or unpublished, in hard copy or electronic
form and managed as discrete units in an information system.

So all records are documents, but not all documents are records.

In other words records are documents that provide evidence of a formal activity or task carried out in an
organization or office. So records need to be retained as long as they have value.

Archives
Archives are records that have been appraised according to a defined process as having continuing value, and
which are accordingly to be kept permanently in some form. Their value may be historical, legal, administrative
or of some other sort.

Recordkeeping
This is the making and maintaining of complete, accurate and reliable evidence of business transactions.

Records Management
The discipline and organizational function of managing records to meet operational business needs,
accountability requirements, and community expectations.

Knowledge Management
The process of identifying, recording, organizing, and dissembling knowledge in an organization.

The roles of IT managers, records managers and corporate librarians have already merged.

The Records Life Cycle vs Continuum Model

The Records Life Cycle

1. Creation
2. Distribution
3. Use
4. Maintenance
5. Disposal

Records are seen as current in stages 1-3, then semi-current in stages 4-5. At the disposal stage they should be
appraised / evaluated: this determines if they are to become archives (permanently retained records of historical
significance) or can be disposed of.

This is a vital step in the management of a working and secure information management system, however it’s
defined, managed or modelled – archives of ongoing evidential worth must be kept, and records that have no
ongoing significance must be disposed of. Otherwise, your organization will sink under the weight of useless
information, and the cost of litigation resulting from inability to keep information mandated by statute for
permanent retention.

Now that we are focusing more on managing the information, a new model has arisen, the so-called records
continuum model.
The Records Continuum
The whole extent of a record’s existence. Refers to a consistent and coherent regime of management processes
from the time of the creation of records through to the preservation and use of records as archives. It sees the
need to manage records from the perspective of the activities which they document, rather than visualising it in
consecutive stages, which is the emphasis of the life cycle analogy.
- Australian Standard AS 3490-1996
Week 3: Content Management
Content Management
Content management (CM) is the administration of digital content throughout its lifecycle, from creation to
permanent storage or deletion. The content involved may be images, video, audio and multimedia as well as
text.
- Wikipedia

The usual stages in digital content management are

1. Creation
2. Editing
3. Publishing (publishing, in this context, means making the content available to users,
whether website visitors or enterprise employees).
4. Oversight, including managing updates and version control.
5. Removal

A tool doesn’t make a website; a website is only as good as the content you put in.
- Managing Enterprise Content, a Unified Content Strategy (Chapter 3)

Mobile is the driving force in the move away from handcrafted content.

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)

DITA is an open standard using XML.
OASIS is the standards organization responsible for the growth and maintenance of DITA.

Learning Materials
 Instructor-led Training (ILT)
 Virtual Classroom Training
 eLearning
 Mobile (mLearning)

ILT (Instructor Lead Training) typically takes approx. 30 hours of development to create one hour of training

eLearning typically takes:

 100 hours of development to one hour of training for basic interactivity
 200 hours of preparation to one hour of training for medium interactivity
 300 hours of preparation to one hour of training for high interactivity

eLearning has associated issues of customization and localization, and high bandwidth

Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)

Reference model / collection of standards for the delivery of eLearning through an LMS, including definition of
reusable content.

Most LCMSs are SCORM-compliant

1997, ADL Ltd.

Types of Content Management Systems

Acronym Stands for… It really means…. Examples

 Content Management A generic term that refers to any of the Too many to list.
CMS
System systems below.
Web Content A program that lets you author, edit, and WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
WCMS
Management System publish your website content easily.
(often referred to as simply
CMS)
Transactional Content Managing the exchange of money and
TCMS
Management System goods / services over the web and product
eCatalogs.
Component Content A database and software program that lets Vasont, XDocs, easyDITA, DITAToo,
CCMS
Management System you store, access, edit, and manage topic- SDL LiveContent and others
level content. Often used for DITA (XML)
content because it manages the
relationships between thousands or
millions of components. This site
primarily deals with CCMSs.
5 Flavours or CCMSs:
 Dedicated
 Web (WCCM)
 Publishing (PCCM)
 Learning (LCCM)
 Enterprise (ECCM)

Enterprise Content Intranet-like tool that allows everyone in EMC Documentum, Atlassian

ECMS
Management System the company to access, manage, and Confluence, Oracle WebCenter. If
review documents, templates, media, and SharePoint had more content
other information assets. Also includes management features, it would be in
collaborative features like wikis. this category.
Document Management A place to store, access, and manage your DocPath, Document Locator,
DMS or EDM
System or PDFs, MS Word, or other documents. SharePoint, LiveLink (now OpenText
Electronic Document Sometimes seen as a component of an ECM Suite, Content Lifecycle
Management ECMS. Management), Oracle Webcenter–
Document Manager)
Learning Content Stores, manages, and publishes or allows Joomla LMS, Absorb LMS
LCMS or
Management System users to experience learning and training
LMS content.
Electronic Document and Stores, manages, and enforces processes Generally speaking, this will be an
EDRMS
Records Management around electronic records, where an optional component of an ECMSs
System electronic record can be loosely defined as such as EMC’s products.
any digital information asset that has value
(email thread, digital documents,
decisions). Can be essential in a highly
litigated industry, like healthcare.
All CMSs share the following features:
 Storing content
 Access control
 Version control
 Check in / check out
 Managing the lifecycle of content – from creation through to final disposition (archive or
 destruction)
 Searching for content
 Publishing content (sometimes)
 Providing analytics or reports

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

...a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization’s documents, and other content, that relate to
the organization’s processes. The term encompasses strategies, methods, and tools used throughout the lifecycle
of the content.
- Wikipedia

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store,
preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM covers the management
of information within the entire scope of an enterprise whether that information is in the form of a paper
document, an electronic file, a database print stream, or even an email.
- AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management International)

The process of breaking content into its element parts is called segmentation or bursting.
Week 4: Information Planning

Publications Development Lifecycle Model (JoAnn Hackos)

Phase 1: Information Planning 10%
Phase 2: Content Specification 20%
Phase 3: Implementation 50%
Phase 4: Production 19%
Phase 5: Evaluation 1%

Phase 1: Information Planning

High level specification of what documentation you argue will be needed (based on analysis audience and
purpose). Two deliverables: an information plan, and a project plan.

Information Plan
 Goals and objectives of the development project
 Goals and objectives for the publications
 Preliminary User Profile (audience analysis, environment analysis)
 High Level Task Analysis
 Design implications and publications strategy
 Preliminary media selection

An information plan is really a proposal, the statement of your team’s analysis of the information solutions that
will best meet user requirements.

 Goals and Objectives of the Development Project

As a publication’s project manager, one of your most important jobs is to understand your organization’s goals
and objectives for a new development project and establish a leadership position in the company. Senior
managers in many organizations don’t believe that publications teams understand the goals of the organizations,
and believe that technical communicators show little interest in or understanding of the business significance of
the projects.

Find out the direction that the rest of the organization is going and align yourself with it or contribute to the
direction in the first place. (Identify the people who set the organization’s direction, and ask the right questions).

 Audience Analysis
Without data, all opinions are equal and the loudest opinions voiced by the most powerful people are more equal
than others. However, nothing argues as loudly as facts. A fact based audience profile will enable your
publications staff to produce better publications

Publications that are designed for well-defined audiences are often less costly to produce and maintain than
publications that simply broadcast all the information we have in hopes that someone will find what they need.
Try to determine facts rather than opinions.

Strongly recommended that training and publications be closely aligned in the development of documents and
job aids. It may be most cost effective to do a single analysis of audience with enough focus on specific details
to satisfy the planning needs of both groups.

Also worthwhile discussing audience analysis with customer support, field support, HR, sales and retail staff,
and customers.
Note that while marketing departments often do extensive research on their audience, the data collected by
marketing and other groups about information users is often inadequate for detailed information planning.

An integral part of audience analysis is an analysis of the environment

…in which the audience functions (site visits). This can highlight some of the challenges your audience faces in
using your documentation / publications.

Task Analysis
The goal is to produce documentation organized according to the tasks users want to perform, rather than
according to the design of the product.

Sample task taxonomy:

 Planning
 Installation
 Administration
 Configuration and customization
 Diagnosis and troubleshooting
 Maintenance

Information Process Maturity Model (IPMM, Hackos)

Describes a continuum of stages of organizational development from immature (Level 0) to optimal (Level 5)

1 Ad hoc
2 Rudimentary
3 Organized and repeatable
4 Managed and sustainable
5 Optimizing

The IPMM evaluates organizations according to 10 key characteristics:

1. Organizational structure
2. Quality Assurance
3. Planning
4. Estimating and Scheduling
5. Hiring and Training
6. Publication Design
7. Cost Control
8. Quality Management
9. Change Management
10. Collaboration
PMI Model
The PMI model is an alternative model for Project Planning.

Initiation Broad plans, specs, estimates, and resources.

Planning Project plan, supporting detail, and plan approval.
Executing Work results and change requests.
Controlling Status reports and corrective action.
Closing Formal acceptance and lessons learned.

Triple Constraints of Project Management

Project Process
Here are the steps in classic project management as we use them, as adapted from the PMBOK Guide. Use these
proven methods to maximize the chances that your project will succeed.

Initiate
1. Select a project manager
2. Divide large projects into phases
3. Determine project objectives
4. Document assumptions and constraints
5. Develop project charter
6. Develop preliminary project scope statement

Plan
1. Create project scope statement
2. Determine team
3. Create work breakdown structure (WBS)
4. Create activity list
5. Estimate resource requirements
6. Determine metrics
7. Estimate time and cost
8. Develop schedule
9. Determine roles and responsibility
10. Identify risk
11. Prepare procurement documents
12. Gain formal approval

Execute
1. Finalize team
2. Execute plan
3. Recommend changes and corrective action
4. Follow processes
5. Conduct team building
6. Schedule progress meetings
7. Select sellers (vendors)

Monitor and Control

1. Assess team against performance measurement baselines
2. Measure according to project plan
3. Determine variance and need for corrective action
4. Verify scope and check for scope creep
5. Integrate change control
6. Perform risk audits
7. Manage reserves
8. Use issue logs
9. Facilitate conflict resolution
10. Measure team member performance
11. Report on performance
12. Create forecasts
13. Administer contracts
Close
1. Develop closure procedures
2. Complete contract closures
3. Confirm work was completed per requirements
4. Gain formal acceptance of product
5. Provide a project “post-mortem”
6. Complete final performance reporting
7. Index and archive records
8. Update “lessons learned” knowledge base
9. Hand off completed product
10. Release resources
Week 5: Content Specification and Task Analysis
A CS should contain at least the following sections:

 Overview of goals and objectives for the entire document set, and the role of the individual deliverable
in the set
 Description of the product or process documented
 Usability goals for the individual publication
 Audience profile for the individual publication
 Objectives of the publication
 Organization of the publication
 Annotated outline of the publication sections
 Predicted page and graphic counts (or other relevant scope metrics e.g.
 for online resources, required video or sound files)

Content Specification Key Purposes

 to understand how the product will support user tasks.
 to deepen understanding of the audience and their goals.
 to structure the proposed contents of the deliverable.
 to reduce the potential for unnecessary rewriting caused by earlier failure to understand the scope and
nature of the deliverable.

Three things distinguish the CS from the information plan

 the amount of time and detail that can be invested is greater.
 the project will be further advanced, so more detail is available on its features.
 more can be learned about the likely context of use.

Task Analysis
Task analysis analyses what a user is required to do in terms of actions and / or cognitive processes to achieve a
task.

You should obtain four outputs from task analysis:

1. Any workarounds used
2. Any artifacts used
3. The task scenarios and concrete use cases that describe users’ work
4. The results from the cognitive walkthrough

These outputs would form part of the requirements specification document.

A goal is an end result to be achieved.

A task is a structured set of related activities that are undertaken in some sequence.
An action is an individual operation or step that needs to be undertaken as part of the task.
Characteristics of Tasks
• The extent to which tasks vary from one occasion to another
• Whether tasks will be carried out once, infrequently, or regularly
• The knowledge and skills required to perform tasks
• How much the work is affected by changes in the environment
• Whether time is critical for the work
• Whether there are safety hazards
• Whether the user will do the work alone or with others
• Whether the user will normally be switching between several tasks

Types of Task Analysis

Workflow analysis follows a piece of work horizontally across more than one person.
Job analysis looks vertically at all the roles carried out by that person.

Recommendation – do both types of analysis if possible.

Task Analysis Method 1: Task Decomposition

The aim of high level task decomposition is to decompose the high level tasks and break them down into their
constituent sub tasks and operations. This will show an overall structure of the main user tasks. At a lower level
it may be desirable to show the task flows, decision processes and even screen layouts.

The process of task decomposition is best represented as a structure chart (similar to that used in Hierarchical
Task Analysis). This shows the sequencing of activities by ordering them from left to right. In order to break
down a task, the question should be asked “how is this task done?”

The task decomposition can be carried out using the following stages:
1. Identify the task to be analyzed.
2. Break this down into between 4 and 8 sub tasks. These sub tasks should be specified in
terms of objectives and, between them, should cover the whole area of interest.
3. Draw the sub tasks as a layered diagram ensuring that it is complete.
4. Decide upon the level of detail into which to decompose. Making a conscious decision at
this stage will ensure that all the sub task decompositions are treated consistently. It may
be decided that the decomposition should continue until flows are more easily
represented as a task flow diagram.
5. Continue the decomposition process, ensuring that the decompositions and numbering
are consistent. It is usually helpful to produce a written account as well as the
decomposition diagram.
6. Present the analysis to someone else who has not been involved in the decomposition but
who knows the tasks well enough to check for consistency.
Method 2: Task flow diagrams
Task flow analysis will document the details of specific tasks. It can include details of interactions between the
user and the current system, or other individuals, and any problems related to them

Keep an eye out for workarounds. Artifacts such as the following can indicate workarounds:

 Sticky notes, cheat sheets, or other work aids on scraps of paper on the desk / screen / computer
 User-created manuals
 Well used reference manuals

Scenarios and Use Cases

A scenario is a description of an everyday situation. A scenario needs to answer the following questions:
 Who is the person involved?
 What triggers the experience?
 What happens?
 What is the result?

Types of Scenarios / Use Cases

 Task Scenarios
 Concrete Use Cases
 Essential Use Cases
 Use Scenarios

A task scenario is a narrative description of a task. It describes the current use of a computer system.
Very detailed, provide step-by-step procedures used by users to get a task done.

A concrete use case is similar to a task scenario. However concrete use cases are not personalized and so
describe the use of a system at a more generic level.

An essential use case describes a task at a high level of abstraction. It is a simple and general description of a
task that contains no assumptions about the type of UI or technology to be used.

A use scenario is also a narrative description of a task, again at a very detailed level.
Cognitive Task Analysis
Recognizes the distinction between physical and cognitive tasks.

Cognitive walkthrough – evaluates the steps required to perform a task and attempts to uncover mismatches
between how the users think about a task and how the IU designer thinks about the task.

Mental Models
Structural Models
 Assume that the user has internalized, in memory, the structure of how a particular device or system works.
 ‘how it works’
 Largely context free
 Enable users to answer unexpected questions and make predictions
 Often require a great deal of effort to create a structural mental model

Functional Models
 Assume that the user has internalized procedural knowledge about how to use the device or system.
Functional models develop from past knowledge of a similar domain, and not from a model of how the
device works.
 ‘how to use it’
 Context dependent
Doing a Substantive Content Audit
Analyze existing information
Marketing
Sales
Customer Service
Web Analytics
Field Engineers

Gathering New Information

Surveys
Interviews / Focus groups
Usability testing
Social media

Personas
After your interviews, consider creating personas for each of your major customer types.
The persona is personalised: it has a name, a history, and goals.

Determine how many personas you need to effectively address your customer base
Give each persona a name and picture
Describe the persona, in as much detail as possible: likes, dislikes, needs, personality type
Define each personas goals

Where Does it Really Hurt?

 Identify the pain points regarding content management and authoring.
 Talk to the highest level of management you can (ask for no more than 30 mins), provide the questions in
advance
 Identifying the D.O.S: Dangers, Opportunities, and Strengths
Week 6: Scoping and Risk
 Establish the organization’s goals for the project

 Clarify the project’s requirements: size, complexity, and quality level

 Identify the project’s audiences and needs

Interview SMEs and others
Direct audience research and customer site visits (environment analysis) are ideal if feasible within
the project’s budget and timeframe

High-level scope consists of two main components:

• Deliverables. If you can’t remember anything else about scope, list your
deliverables. Defining your deliverables goes a long way toward defining the overall scope of the project.

• Boundaries. You should also try to define the boundaries of your project. Boundary statements help to
separate the things that are applicable to your project from those areas that are out of scope.

 State the usability requirements for your project and audience

Will you carry out usability testing? If so, how?
Will you use the results of your testing to amend your project deliverables?
Emphasize ease of access to information for experienced users, and step-by-step coverage for more
inexperienced ones.

 Project Milestones Schedule

Usually they will be staggered, in order to make more efficient use of staff time.

 Use dependencies to assess risk

Internal dependencies are described in the project plan. These are necessary factors for the project to
move from one phase to the next.

External dependencies are factors beyond your control, outside your documentation project.

Scope is different from time and cost. Time and cost are outputs of scope. Scope involves developing a common
understanding as to what is included in, or excluded from, a project. Deciding how long it will take or how
much it will cost come after scope is defined.

Other Work to Consider when Scoping

• Preparation of training material
• Delivery of training
• Business Process documentation
• Business Process Re-engineering
• Rework
• Project management and administration
• Vendor management
• Security
• Disaster recovery plans
• Business continuity plans
• Provision and setup of equipment
• Software
• Communication
• Support after go-live
• Recruitment of permanent or contract staff
• Staff performance management and evaluation
• Hardware upgrade or purchase
• Hardware installation
• Data preparation for transfer

Creating the Project Plan

Deliverables:
 Estimate of scope and complexity of the project
 Estimate of time, budget and deadline
 Estimate of resources required (people, equipment, tools)
 Roles & responsibilities of team members
 A production plan
 A localization and translation plan
 A usability testing plan
 A maintenance plan

A lot of projects are revisions of prior / existing projects, so use as much information from those as you can.

Avoid early pressure to write / draft. Planning is a cognitive process.

 Never begin writing drafts until the planning process is complete.

 Planning may be best conducted by senior staff with good communication skills, information gathering
skills, and political savvy, then passed on to other team members.
 Estimates become more accurate as the project proceeds. For that reason, you should plan to re-estimate a
project as you learn more about its size and complexity.

Omitting an estimate of scope is like asking a construction company to guarantee a firm bid on a highway
project without specifying the length of the highway.

Tips for estimating:

 Use the size and scope from previous projects
 Use competitors’ publications
 Postponing (the estimate) is a reliable response to an irresponsible request
 Include times for re-estimates as a standard part of your project milestone schedule
 Scope is directly related to desired quality

Lower levels of quality are insisted upon / demanded / caused by insisting on inadequate schedules, people, and
budget.

1975 STC hours-per-page estimate: 5 hours per page

(High-tech information = 7 hours)

Size & scope x quality x hours / page = Estimate of required

hours and budget
Hackos’ Dependencies Calculator

To assess a dependency, the project manager rates the dependency on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is the best case
and 5 is the worst case. 3 represents the center point, a 1 or 2 represents a better than average project, a 3 or 4
represents a worse than average project.

NOTE
The composite scores for product stability are twice the scores for the other dependencies.
This indicates that product stability is weighted more heavily than each of the other eight
dependencies.

1.10 x 1.10 x 1.00 x 0.95 x 0.90 x 0.95 x 1.05 x 1.00 x 1.00 = 1.135
Performing a Content Audit
The content audit is intended to illustrate where opportunities to unify content throughout your organization
exist; it provides the basis for your reuse strategy and modelling decisions.

Stages of the content audit

 Identifying scope
 Selecting representative samples of content based on the scope of the project
 Assessing the quality of the content: appropriateness, quality of writing, fit for audience / purpose / channel
 Assess opportunities for reuse
 Analyse content for reuse

Analyzing the Content for Reuse

Top level analysis
Scanning various information products to find common information (e.g. product descriptions, introductory
information, procedures, disclaimers, contact details, topics)

In-depth analysis
Examine the repeated information identified in the top-level analysis.
Identify whether the content is identical, or similar. If it’s similar, which parts differ? Do they need to differ?
Week 7: Tracking and Revision
If you have staff working on more than one project at once, studies have shown you should allow an extra 20%
of estimated time to cover loss of productivity as staff swap over from one job to another.

Institute a regular reporting schedule for every staff member. Get an email report of progress from each team
member at an agreed point every week.

Project Equations
These look at the major constraints facing projects, and the options they present for revision strategies.
 Extend the length of the project
 Increase the number of people working on it
 Reduce the scope of the project
 Reduce the quality of the project

Estimating project costs

Publications projects are primarily labour intensive; few costs are associated with equipment or outside
resources.

Direct Costs
The total labour costs include not only the salary paid to individual employees, but also the cost of direct
benefits, such as health benefits, pensions, and tax payments.

Indirect Costs
Equipment, office space, heat and light, training.

Direct Costs + Indirect Costs = Fully Burdened Costs.

For many companies, the fully burdened costs equal 2.5 to 3 times salary.

For the sample department above, the average hourly cost is $115 200 divided by 1896 hours, or $61 per hour.

Calculate project costs by estimating the hourly costs per employee.

Note that Eleanor has assumed that a writer working fulltime on one project will be able to devote an average of
6 hours per day to the project, 5 days a week, after deducting time for departmental meetings, sick days,
training, and other interruptions.

They decide on a 12% factor for project management.

15% for editing
Most writers know they cannot effectively edit their own work because they are too close to it.

Creating a preliminary schedule of milestones

To track a project and determine if it is on schedule, a project manager must know if milestones have been met.
To control a project and guarantee that it will be completed on time and on budget, a project manager must
measure milestones. To measure a milestone, one must have something to measure. Measurable milestones
require clear definitions of required deliverables.
In general, you will find it useful to re-estimate a project at each major milestone.

The best estimators realize that the worst estimates they will ever make are the estimates they make early in a
project lifecycle.

Assigning Roles & Responsibilities to Team Members

You may find that you need to list at least three groups for every project:
 The publications team
 The development and marketing team
 The team of technical reviewers and subject matter experts

Publications Team
Project manager
Writers
Editors
Graphics designers
Artists

Planning for Testing

Two types of testing exist for publications: validation testing and usability assessment.

Validation is the process of ensuring that the information in the publications matches the products described.

Planning for Maintenance

As project manager, you need to explain what plans you have made for maintaining the publications. For
example, policy and procedure publications may be reissued on a regular schedule with emergency updates
issued on an ad hoc basis in more ephemeral publications.

Summary
The Information Plan describes what is to be built and is planned in light of the information gathered from user,
task, product, and market analyses early in the development lifecycle.

The Project Plan describes the project manager’s strategies for getting the job done, including the early estimate
of the size of the project, the calculation of risk factors or dependencies, the early estimate of the total time
needed to complete the project, the assignment of hours to people, and the calculation of a schedule.

Designing an Effective Review Process

Many writers, often because of tight deadlines, don’t take the time to properly plan the documents they’re going
to write. In my experience, the simple act of planning can save hours of time for each participant and during
each step of in the review process.

Where possible, remind authors to set aside their first draft for at least a day before returning to it and beginning
to revise it. Even a short time away from the manuscript provides the critical distance they need to revise it well.

 Perform Quality Control (Internal Review)

Internal review takes two forms:
The first, which is present in all organizations, is a straightforward technical review.
The second form of internal review is an editorial or peer review.

Performing an editorial review before the technical review offers a large payback: providing a well-edited
document for review allows technical reviewers to focus on the content.
 Perform Quality Control (External Review)
The people who perform the internal review are familiar with the subject of the document, and thus may not be
representative of the typical reader.

 Near-Final Review
At least one final or near final review stage is necessary. In traditional print publishing, this review occurred
after layout of the document and was referred to as proofreading (i.e. reading the document as proof that the
final results were correct).

Envisioning Your Unified Content Strategy

 What types of content your customer needs
 What format or media they need it in
 When they need the content
Week 8: Metadata
Metadata can be used to describe the behaviour, processes, rules, and structure of data as well as add descriptive
information.

Descriptive metadata
Categorizes your documents and is usually used by content users to retrieve content.

Component metadata
Identifies your content at the element / component level and is used by authors to retrieve content components.

Customers tend to retrieve information based on descriptive metadata, whereas authors tend to retrieve
information based on component metadata.

The term metadata refers to "data about data". The term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally
different concepts (types):

Structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called "data
about the containers of data";

Descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content. In
this case, a useful description would be "data about data content" or "content about content" thus metacontent.

Metadata is key to these functions (basically—finding and managing content)

 Search
 Distribution
 Access
 Retention

Benefits of metadata
 Reduction of redundant content
 Improved workflow
 Reduced costs

Most CMSs, portals, and other publishing tools support seven metadata fields:
 Title
 Keywords
 Description
 Publish date
 Review date
 Expiry date
 Author
Types of Metadata
Descriptive or publication metadata
 Used to help customers find information.
 Creating descriptive metadata – who are your customers and what are they trying to accomplish?
 Find existing categories—how are websites organized?

Some industries have created industry-specific taxonomies, sometimes known as vertical taxonomies.

Component Metadata
Helps content creators find information before it’s published. In particular it allows content creators to find
information at the component level so it can be used in multiple outputs.

Applied to the individual reusable components, not the completed product.

There are two main types of component metadata:

 Reuse and retrieval metadata
 Tracking or status metadata

Reuse and retrieval metadata

Designed to help authors find content

When inconsistencies exist between metadata or categorization systems, you can apply a crosswalk to compare
them and help sort out the differences.

Crosswalk
Identifies shared and diverging usage of information between different information systems. Once this is done,
you can use it as a basis of rationalizing the information in them, either by renaming the different elements, or
linking them together.

CRM KM CMS
Title Subject Information product
Title

Metadata Standards
Dublin Core
 Promotes the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards.
 Resource Description Framework (RDF) compliant.
 Designed for digital content in an online context
 The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set defines 15 elements of semantic metadata:

 Contributor
 Coverage
 Creator
 Date
 Description
 Format
 Identifier
 Language
 Publisher
 Relation
 Rights
  Source
 Subject
 Title
 Type

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

 Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
 Framework for describing and interchanging metadata; unlike Dublin Core, it doesn’t actually define
metadata
 XML based
 Provides a model for describing resources (content)
 A resource is an object that can be uniquely defined by a Unique Resource Identifier (URI)

eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP)

Also RDF compliant
Created by Adobe

Recommendations for Metadata

Everyone wants good metadata, but no one has worked out how to get it
- Step Two Designs

 Simply mandating or enforcing the capture of metadata will not be effective, as this doesn’t prevent the
author from filling in only a few words for each field, or garbage. Tips:

o Use the minimum number of metadata fields

o Use dropdown lists wherever possible
o Ensure meaningful field names
o Provide supporting help text or descriptive information

 Only metadata that has a concrete and immediate need should be captured. Efforts should be focused on the
most important content, rather than trying to capture complete metadata for the entire site.

 Where possible, the creation and capture of metadata should be automated.

Taxonomies / Controlled Vocabularies

Taxonomy – the science of classifying things

A restricted, standardized list of words or terms typically used for descriptive cataloguing, tagging or indexing.

At its simplest, a taxonomy organizes information, and metadata describes it.

Types of Taxonomies
Term List
A standardized list of terms created to ensure consistent tagging and indexing.

Authority File
Includes synonyms or variants for each term which function as cross-references to guide the user from a ‘non-
preferred term’ variant to the equivalent ‘preferred term’.

Taxonomy
A controlled vocabulary in which all the terms belong to a single hierarchical structure and have parent / child or
broad / narrower relationships to other terms.

Thesaurus
Translates conceptual relationships between the content, often made naturally by humans, info something a
computer can understand.

In a dictionary thesaurus all the associated terms might be used in place of the term entry depending on the
specific context. The content retrieval thesaurus however is designed for all contexts, regardless of a specific
term usage or document. The synonyms or near-synonyms must be suitably equivalent in all circumstances.

 Equivalent / synonyms
 Hierarchical (broad-to-narrow)
 Associative (related terms)

Not every metadata field needs to have a controlled vocabulary, so it must be decided which will have
controlled vocabularies and which will not.

Fields such as title or filename should allow free text, and numeric fields such as size and date, also do not use
controlled vocabularies.
Week 9: XML and Structured Authoring
XML is a markup language used for structured authoring. Structured authoring is a publishing workflow that
lets you enforce consistent organization of information in documents, whether print or online. In structured
authoring, a file—either a DTD or schema—captures content structuring rules. Authors work in software that
validates their documents (verifies that the documents they create conform to the rules in the definition file).

Structured authoring is a concept. XML is a specification that lets you implement structured authoring using
plain text files.

XML and structured authoring result in a completely different way of looking at information. Instead of the
familiar page- and paragraph-based metaphor, structured authoring requires that authors consider information as
a hierarchy with a separate formatting layer.

Unlike SGML, XML is widely used outside the technical publishing world, especially for data interchange and
web services applications.

Markup language: a set of annotations (tags) on text that describe how the text is to be structured, laid out, or
formatted: SGML, XML, HTML, RTF.

Unlike HTML, where the tags are defined, XML doesn’t provide a set of predefined tags. XML allows you to
create the tags to suit the needs of your content and your authors.

Elements and Attributes

Structured authoring is based on elements. An element is a unit of content; it can contain text or other elements.

You can store additional information about the elements in attributes. An attribute is a name-value pair that is
associated with a particular element. Attributes provide a further way of classifying information. Attributes are
stored inside the element tags.

Elements have start tags, end tags, and content.

Attributes have names and values.

History of XML
1970s SGML: Structured Generalized Markup Language (IBM)
Complex

W3C goals for developing XML:

 Web-based delivery
 Open standard
 Based on SGML but simplified / easier to implement
 Extensible
 Easy to author and create, and develop applications for

Use of XML has spread beyond content markup to all sorts of other business and software applications.

XML is not the only technology for reuse, but it is by far the most powerful.

XML Tags
 Describe your document’s content
 Describe the structure of your document
 Indicate hierarch of data through embedded elements
 Do not include formatting or “style” characteristics
XML was designed to describe data and to focus on what data is
HTML was designed to display data and to focus on how data looks

Advantages of XML
 Promotes consistency through structured documents
 Separates structure from format, allowing authors to focus on writing
 Enables single-sourcing (component reuse)
 Enables multiple outputs; publishing information is isolated from the content
 Increases output flexibility

XML is said to be well-formed when basic tagging rules are followed:

 All opening elements have a corresponding closing elements
 Attributes information is enclosed I double quotes
 Tags are nested and do not “cross over” each other

XML is said to be valid when the structure of the XML matches the structure specified in the structure
definition.

DTDs and schemas

In XML structure can be defined in a schema or DTD (Document Type Definition) that defines all the elements
(tags) that can be used in a document, as well as the relationship of those elements to other elements. You can
specify the hierarchy of elements, the order of elements, even the number of elements.

DTDs and schemas

 Are formal documents written I a particular syntax that specifies an XML vocabulary (set of tags)

 Describe which elements and entities may appear in associated documents, including:
 Elements
 Attributes
 Child elements
 Number of children
 Sequence of elements
 Mixed content
 Empty elements
 Text declarations

 Document content models in a formal manner

Advantages of Schemas over DTDs
Schemas are updated DTDs. They include all the capabilities of DTDs, plus:
 They are written as well-formed XML documents (DTDs are created using a different, unique
language)
 Data can be validated based on built-in and user-defined data types
 Programmers can more easily create complex and reusable content
 Schemas support local and global variables in the XML document

Most XML-authoring tools have built-in parsers to parse the content as you enter it and to ensure that the
elements and content match the requirements of the schema.

XSL
XML presentation is created using XSL stylesheet. XSL is used to transform (or convert or publish) to the
output formats you want to deliver.

 Is XML markup language itself

 Can format content for online display or paper-based delivery
 Can add constant text or graphics
 Can filter content
 Can sort or reorder content
 Is really divided into three parts:
o XSLT—a transformation language
o XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects—a language used to format XML)
o XPath

Rather than simply formatting the information in a document, XSL gives you the ability to transform it into
something else. That is, you can manipulate the information to reorder, repeat, filter out, or add information.

The most common use of XSLT is to transform information to HTML for display on the web. XSLT can also be
used to convert information from XML into markup for mobile.

You can create any number of XSLT stylesheets for a single XML document; web, mobile, print etc (XSL-FO
was designed for print).

DITA
 DITA is an existing markup standard.
 Originally developed by IBM, the standard was passed to OASIS
 DITA is an open standard that includes a set of predefined structures for capturing topic-based content and
gives you a set of tags and structures to use as-is or as a starting point for creating your own specialized
structures
 DITA is output independent. Topics are written in DITA to be output into other formats as necessary.
 Designed for reuse. Defines the topic as the basic building block of content
 DITA uses four different topic structures:
o Concept
o Generic
o Task
o Reference
 The base definition for all topics comes from the generic topic.
 DITA is based on a topic architecture that sees output products built from topics aggregated by a DITA map

Goals
 Move away from single format to multiple formats and outputs
 Move away from SGML to XML
 Move towards minimalism
  Provide more flexibility in structures and move away from “monolithic” DTDs
 Support maximum reuse

Alternatives to DITA
DocBook
 Originally developed as an SGML language for converting, sharing, and authoring technical
manuals for UNIX systems. Eventually management moved over to OASIS.
 Very robust; accommodates virtually any model of documentation guide possible
 Complex; over 300 elements

Pros
 XQuery—a language for extracting data from XML repositories, just as SQL is a query
language for extracting data from relational databases
Cons
 Doesn’t support reuse well
 Overly complex
 Designed for creation of books, not web

Established Standards
 DITA for topic-based technical documentation
 S1000D for military equipment
 SPL for pharmaceutical labelling
 NLM: National Library of Medicine (DTD)

Roles and Responsibilities

The roles and responsibilities in a typical publishing group change when structure authoring is implemented.
The document architect defines and implements document structure. The document architect must identify
information types and establish their required structure.

 Template designer.
 Writer
 Technical editors
 Production Editors

Not every content-creation group will benefit from structured authoring and XML. Sometimes the expense of
implementation outweighs the benefits realized, especially in smaller groups with a smaller amount of content.
Week 10: Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an
organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and
experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals
or embedded in organizations as processes or practices.
- Wikipedia definition of Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.
- Davenport 1994

Knowledge Management originated within the consulting community. KM deals with knowledge as well as
information, and it includes tacit as well as explicit knowledge.

What is Knowledge
Classical philosophy has an entire sector of study called epistemology: the theory of knowledge. The key thing
about knowledge is that it is possessed by human beings. Knowledge has an intrinsic relationship to the knower.

Information is data that has been given structure, and knowledge is information that has been given meaning.
In essence, knowledge is information that has been interpreted by individuals and given a context.

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

KM strategies should address business objectives, not KM objectives.

Much of an organization’s valuable knowledge walks out the door at the end of the day.

When asked, most executives will state that their greatest asset is the knowledge held by their employees. Using
the intellectual capital or asset approach, it is essential to identify knowledge that is of value and is also at risk
of being lost to the organization through retirement, turnover, and competition.

The most important knowledge employees often leave first.

Multidisciplinary Nature of KM

Tacit knowledge tends to reside within the heads of knowers (expertise, know-how, tricks of the trade),
whereas

Explicit knowledge is usually contained within tangible or concrete media.

There is also somewhat of a paradox at play here: highly skilled, experienced, and expert individuals may find it
harder to articulate their know-how. Novices, on the other hand, are more apt to easily verbalize what they are
attempting to do because they are typically following a manual or how-to process.

If you can’t manage what you can’t measure, then you can’t measure what you can’t name.
The major business drivers behind today’s increased interest and application of KM:

 Globalization of business
 Leaner organizations
 Corporate amnesia
 Technological advances

Some critical KM challenges are to manage content effectively, facilitate collaboration, help knowledge workers
connect, find experts, and help the organization to learn to make decisions based on complete, valid, and well-
interpreted data, information, and knowledge.

In order for KM to succeed, it has to tap into what is important to knowledge workers, what is of value to them
and to their professional practice as well as what the organization stands to gain.
Three Eras of Knowledge Management
Before the first wave of KM in the early 90s there had been document and information management, both
clearly labelled as such.

First Generation: Leveraging Explicit Knowledge (90s)

1990s: Peter Drucker coined the terms “knowledge worker”, “knowledge economy”, and “knowledge age”.
Drucker predicted the knowledge based economy, noting that wealth and power, which had previously been
based on land and capital, was shifting and would increasingly be based on knowledge.

Creation of document / information repositories, mostly storing explicit knowledge

Information technology approach, leaning heavily toward a top-down approach.

Limitations
 Difficult to get people to document their knowledge, and to get others to make use of documentation
 Organizations only supporting explicit knowledge that could be written down

Second Generation: Leveraging Experiential Knowledge (2000-)

Recognition that:
 Much of an organization’s critical knowledge is “know how” in the heads of front line workers
 Know-how is hard to put into databases because it is context specific, and dynamic
 In changing environments knowledge is dynamic and rapidly changing, so that what is “captured” is soon
out-of-date
 Front line workers have the capability to make sense of their own processes and to redesign their actions to
increase their effectiveness
 Knowledge is essentially social and is developed and held by groups of people who engage together in a
specific practice
 Learning does not result from experience alone, it results from reflection on experience

Much more of a people-based approach, based on a bottom-up grassroots approach.

Knowledge professionals overwhelmingly turned to Communities of Practice to make “know-how” available.

Communities of Practice (CoP)

 A group of people who share a craft and/or a profession
 Lave and Wenger first used the term communities of practice to describe learning through practice and
participation, which they named situated learning
 Members of CoPs do not have to be co-located; they can form a “virtual community of practice”
(VCoP), or a “mobile community of practice” (mCoP)
 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger coined the phrase in their 1991 book, 'Situated learning'
 Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 2000 book, 'Communities of Practice'.
Organizations began to support communities of peers, providing a way for them to ask for and receive
knowledge on a just-in-time basis and thus keeping fast changing knowledge up-to-date
The idea that frontline employees held important knowledge was revolutionary because up until that time,
knowledge had been regarded as the purview of managers and experts. For almost a hundred years, the accepted
point of view in organizations was that “managers think, workers do.”

This recognition led to another significant change - the role of reflection in learning from experience. 

First era Warehouse analogy Connecting people to content

Second era Network analogy Connecting people to people

Limitations
 Knowledge was flowing primarily between peers and was largely limited to frontline employees; Lateral
transfer worked well, but there was little flow between hierarchical levels, for example
 Knowledge management was primarily dealing with existing knowledge
 The focus of knowledge management was tactical issues to the exclusion of strategic issues. So a team or
project could use reflection processes or communities to improve how they were meeting their goals, but if
the goals themselves were in the wrong direction, the model provided no way to find that out.

Third Generation: Leveraging Collective Knowledge

In leading edge organizations we see knowledge management professionals focusing on the:
• Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives
• Integration of the organization’s knowledge, and
• Increased transparency

The synthesis of diverse perspectives comes from being able to hold both one’s own and others’ perspectives in
mind at the same time.

The second generation is characterized by the importance of content—how to describe and organize content so
that intended end users are aware that it exists, and can easily access and apply this content. This phase is
characterized by the advent of metadata to describe the content in addition to the format of content, content
management, and knowledge taxonomies.

The processes used to leverage collective knowledge are conversation based.

Due to increasingly complex organizational issues, leaders cannot be expected to have all the answers; rather the
task of leaders becomes convening the conversations that can come up with new answers. Convening the
conversation that brings diverse perspectives together in order to integrate the knowledge is a leadership task,
involving four tasks:

 Framing the question

 Configuring the physical space to serve the conversation
 Identifying who needs to be in the conversation
 Design the interaction
Week 11: Electronic Document Management
EDMSs focus primarily on storage and archiving and document lifecycle management.

Each unit of information (document) is usually self-contained, as distinct from ERMS; there are few if any links
between documents

A record is an evidentiary record of a business transaction.

A document is any structured unit of recorded information.

So typically ERMS do one thing that EDMS do not—they link content of differing types and differing locations,
by differing authors, across an IT environment.

The emphasis in the last fifteen years has been to expand EDMS beyond word processing documents and
spreadsheets to incorporate all the aspects of Digital Asset Management (DAM) including scanned documents,
digital photographs, digital video, and sound files.

Often include powerful workflow for incorporating business processes into the management of documents.

Many DMSs include advanced scanning and imaging capabilities (for digitizing hard copy files) that can’t be
found in most content management systems

Electronic records management systems are sometimes referred to as ‘fully featured’ as compared with systems
that manage individual documents but not classifications of them.

Retention rules are usually based on the organization’s practice of Records Management. These rules include
archiving.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Advantages of EDMS
 Centralized management
 Version control
 Access control
 Improving Workflow
 Regulatory Compliance
 Backup (BCP / DR)
 Cost Reduction
 Consistency
 Convenient retrieval—multiple people can access a document at once

Metadata has three applications within any document management system:

 Search
 Display
 Organization

Implementing an EDMS
The technology itself is less important than the people who will use it and the business processes it will support.

Filing was once the specialty of file clerks; document management with a EDMS is everyone’s responsibility.
All users need to know where to file and how to classify information.
Week 12: Electronic Records Management
Most of today’s records start out in electronic form: emails, letters, faxes, web transactions…

Is ERM the electronic management of paper records, or the management of electronic records? Answer: both.

ERM drivers: Effectiveness, efficiency, compliance, continuity.

Records are created, received, and used in the conduct of organizational activities.
Organizations should create and maintain authentic, reliable, and usable records.

Records must be managed through their lifecycle (and disposed of at the end of the lifecycle).
Records must be kept as long as required.
Retaining records longer than required may increase organizational liability.

Entering metadata is often called ‘indexing’

Different users of an ERM system will have different views of what metadata can do for them, and what
metadata is required:
 Business perspective
 Records management perspective
 User perspective

Because records contain factual information that occurred in the past, records must not be altered or changed in
any way whatsoever.

Search & retrieval are key ERM user activities. Users can search a repository or location for records by:
 Metadata
 Content
 A combination of metadata and content
 Browsing the classification structure

Benefits of destroying records at the end of the lifecycle:

 Storage costs
 Search & retrieval
 Discovery
 Reduces legal risk
 IT management overhead

Records management policy: critical requirement for effective governance

Many ECM systems include records management

ERMS first started appearing in the 1990s.

In 2001 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released ISO 15489, its standard for records
management based on an Australian standard. The Australian standard was later replaced with the ISO standard.

ISO Standard 15489:2001 defines Records Management (RM) as the field of management responsible for
the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records.

An enterprise-wide classification scheme within an ERMS allows us to establish and manage:

 Retention and disposition rules
 Security and access controls
 Digital rights management
 Information sharing
 Findability
 Retention
ECM offers an integrated set of applications including content, document, records, and web content
management with tools for workflow and collaboration.

Electronic records management systems are sometimes referred to as fully-featured, compared to systems that
manage individual documents but not classifications of them.

Typically ERMS do one that that EDMS do not—they link content of differing types and differing locations, by
different authors, across an IT environment.

Crucial to ERMS is the ability to manage not just electronic word processing documents, but all types of
records, including images, email and databases.

Structured data is data that resides in a fixed field within a record or file. This includes data contained in
relational databases and spreadsheets.

Unstructured data is everything else; discrete items such as forms, Word documents, email, and images.

The challenge of ERMS is to link related content across structured and unstructured information applications,
and possibly even in hard copy.

Taxonomy

A records taxonomy is a corporate-wide schema for the identification, retrieval, and disposition of all business
records.

Taxonomies should comprise:

 Classification schemes
 Relationship models
 Naming conventions

In the old days of paper record keeping, the structure of most filing systems was a ‘file classification’ system.
This was a top down system, often based on organizational structures. The records management system could be
said to take vertical slices down through an organization, treating the records of one team / division as one
‘slice’.

Modern hierarchies are much more fluid, with important functions often outsourced to other organizations or
contractors; this has led to a change in approach to record keeping—the adoption of the business classification /
business taxonomy approach. These classifications tend to be ‘functional’ not ‘structural’ i.e. they are
determined by the activities undertaken by staff. These systems take ‘horizontal slices’ across organizations.

The foundation of a business taxonomy is task analysis.

Taxonomic records keeping systems tend to be associated with controlled vocabularies and thesauri, which
are aids to metadata, where a controlled number of standard terms are applied to defined and specified functions,
processes, projects, roles, and objects.

Developing a taxonomy is not a clerical process. It includes business process analysis, use of communication
strategies and tools, and legislative and compliance reviews, as well as engaging management, professional, and
technical staff in a work-altering project.

Training Approach
‘Train the trainer’ approach: an individual from each business unit is given extensive training in the new system
so her or she has in-depth knowledge of the new structure. That person becomes the ‘trainer’ for that business
unit, conducting the introductory session and following up with each staff member. This approach essentially
creates a ‘super-user’/ ‘champion’ / ‘go-to’ person in each business unit to help anyone who is having difficulty
finding or storing documents.
Storing Records in the Cloud
Three delivery models:
 SaaS
 PaaS
 IaaS

Four deployment models:

 Public
 Private
 Hybrid
 Community cloud

Economies of scale, pay-per-use, unlimited scale without upfront costs

Week 13: Change Management and Information
Governance
Change management is an approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations to a desired future
state. Change management uses basic structures and tools to control organizational change efforts, with the goal
of maximizing benefits and minimizing negative impact on those affected. In some project management
contexts, change management refers to a project management process wherein changes to a project are formally
introduced and approved.
- Wikipedia

Change Management Strategies

Change management strategies and practices commonly include:
• Communicating to people on an ongoing basis about:
• why change needs to happen
• the plan for implementing the change
• the ongoing status of the change
• the successes you have achieved in early implementations
• the problems you have encountered and how you fixed them or plan to avoid them in the
future.
• Involving a ‘change agent’ (people from the areas being affected by the change) to help
you implement the change.
• Using a champion (senior management) to endorse and evangelize your project.
• Educating people at the beginning of a project as well as throughout the project lifecycle.
• Involving workers in setting up metadata and taxonomy definition.
• Identifying early on user needs for training and for manuals of operation and administration

It is natural that most people initially react with caution with concerns about their future, security and where
they will fit in to a new order of things.

Change management is the art of influencing the majority to positively accept and commit emotionally to the
change. The '4 Cs' of change management help us think about the change from an affected user point of view.

Comfort
People are creatures of habit and develop patterns of working within a comfort zone of daily activities.

Control
Changed practices may cause a loss of control over daily routines and activities. This may come through
changed reporting lines or responsibilities which can evoke a level of discomfort.

Confidence
The introduction of new practices may undermine employee confidence in their ability to perform. Some may
see this as challenge, for others it can be stressful. Often the introduction of computer equipment is something
that can be discomforting. Some people, particularly older workers may have no experience with computers and
can cause self-doubt over their abilities to learn the new skills required.

Competence
To be able to operate in a changed work environment there is always an element of re-skilling required. This
necessarily means that current skills, often developed over an extended period of time, will need updating or
may become redundant. This uncertainty can impact on an employee's competence and ability to perform.
Research shows proves that higher levels of user acceptance and greater use of installed solutions are achieved
when deliberate change management activities are included in the implementation work plan and life cycle. Best
practice in change management is focused on the early involvement of stakeholders and on building a trusting
relationship. 

Change Management Roles and Responsibilities

The change manager works very closely with stakeholders and it is important that relationships based on trust
are established. The personal attributes of a successful change manager are empathy and patience. The
role and responsibility of the change manager is focused on understanding stakeholder needs, building an
awareness of the need for change and supporting these stakeholders as they transition to new work practices.

Some key responsibilities for the change manager include communications, setting up reporting and
communication channels, participating in business process reform, workshop facilitation, staff training,
mentoring and awareness building. In short, any activity that interacts and prepares the user community to
participate in reformed work practices.

Many routinely conducted project activities such as workshops, interviews, training and presentations are
in fact change management opportunities as these events are interactions with stakeholders. They therefore
present the ideal opportunity to develop the relationship of trust between the project team members and
stakeholders.

Further, 'champions' can be identified from within the stakeholder community. This provides a critical change
management input. As these champions are representatives drawn from the stakeholder community their roles
can be a very influential and positive contributor to project success.

Information Governance
Information governance is a holistic approach to managing corporate information by Implementing processes,
roles, controls and metrics that treat information as a valuable
business asset.

The goal of a holistic approach to information governance is to make information assets available to those who
need it, while streamlining management, reducing storage costs and ensuring compliance. This, in turn, allows
the company to reduce the legal risks associated with unmanaged or inconsistently managed information and be
more agile in response to a
changing marketplace.

The Information Governance Reference Model is available to corporations, analyst firms, industry

associations and other parties as a tool for communicating with and to organization stakeholders on
responsibilities, processes and practices for information governance. It can help establish the importance of
linking stakeholders, particularly those responsible for ensuring that the legal duties for information are met,
those that understand the business value of information and those that manage information assets. The IGRM is
unique as a model in that it casts light on the dependencies across these stakeholders for legal compliance and
defensible disposal.
Rockley and Cooper
If you involve people early, on, really listen to them, and show them that you’re addressing their requirements,
they will become your biggest supporters.

Don’t just communicate the plan, communicate why the change is taking place.

Communicate
 Explain WHY the change is taking place
 Explain how it will affect them
 Explain the plan
 Ongoing status communications
 Successes

Lack of communication breeds rumour and resistance

Get a Champion
Someone high up the chain
Someone who understands the culture, the key stakeholders, the problem-makers

Elicit the Help of Change Agents

GDID 704: VISUAL DESIGN
Week 1: Introduction
Studies of reading show that people who are confronted with content begin to interpret that content immediately.

“they could make such judgements reliably and consistently, based on their looking at a webpage for only one-
twentieth of a second”

Researchers have shown that people remember content presented visually more easily than content presented
verbally.

Research finds that a careful integration of both words and pictures engages people more effectively than either
alone.

“When designers provide access to their content through both visual and verbal means – what psychologists call
“dual coding” – readers will have two ways of understanding the content and are more likely to remember it”

“readers tended to give stories with short paragraphs twice as much attention as those with longer paragraphs”

“Studies of how people read on the web suggest that getting people to sustain their reading represents one of the
biggest challenges for authors of websites”

In the early 20th century, Gestalt psychologists studied how the properties of the visual world shape our
perceptions – the way things look depends not just on the properties of their elementary parts, but also, more
importantly, on their organization. Contrast is fundamental to human perception. The human eye is attracted to
areas of high contrast:

 dark / light
 large / small
 thick / thin
 saturated colour / unsaturated colour

The best typographic contrast is achieved by using black type on a white background.

Typefaces
Readers pay more attention to the amount of contrast among styles within a typeface (e.g. light, medium, bold,
extrabold, black) than they do to the distinction between serif and sans serif.

Research shows that when the typographic resolution is excellent, serif or sans serif typefaces are equally legible
and equally fast to read. However, when the resolution is average or poor, sans serif is more legible.

 Whether they are young or old, more people prefer sans serif when they read online.
 87-95% of the time readers were found to prefer sans serif type in computer displays
 10-point type is read more slowly, but more accurately, than 12-point
 12-point is read faster, but less accurately, than 10-point
 Smaller typography slows reading, but tends to be read with better accuracy
 Most readers prefer larger type (12- to 14-point) rather than smaller type
 Older readers (70+) prefer 14-point sans serif
 When body text is displayed in all capitals, reading speed can be slowed by 13-20%
 When extra emphasis is needed, bold has been found to be a better cue than uppercase
Grouping can have cognitive and affective benefits for readers
 Readers can often make connections across the content that they might miss otherwise.
 Grouping helps make what otherwise might be invisible structures apparent to the reader.
“Clutter is a failure of design, not an attribute of information” – Edward Tufte

The difference between art and design

“Good art inspires. Good design motivates”

“Good art is interpreted. Good design is understood”

“Good art is a taste. Good design is an opinion”

“Good art is a talent. Good design is a skill”

“Good art sends a different message to everyone. Good design sends the same message to everyone”

The designer’s job isn’t to invent something new, but to communicate something that already exists, for a
purpose. That purpose is almost always to motivate the audience to do something: buy a product, use a service,
visit a location, learn certain information. The most successful designs are those that most effectively
communicate their message and motivate their consumers to carry out a task.

The fundamental purpose of design is to communicate a message and motivate the viewer to do something.
Week 2 / 3: Elements of Visual Design Part 1 & 2 (CRAP)
 Contrast
 Repetition
 Alignment
 Proximity

Contrast
Contrast shows difference between design objects, and creates emphasis

Contrast is important because the meaningful essence of anything is defined by its value, properties, or quality
relative to something else.

Contrast must be strong and self-evident – there must be enough contrast for the user to see the difference.
Elements that aren’t the same should be very different so they stand out; making them “slightly different”
confuses the user into seeing a relation that doesn’t exist. Strong contrast between page elements allows the
user’s eye to flow from one to another down the page instead of creating a sea of similarity that’s boring and not
communicative.

Almost all design elements can be manipulated to create contrast; the key is to avoid elements that are sort of
alike.

Gestalt
 A German term coined in the 1920s, which describes a design’s wholeness
 A design’s unity is more than the simple addition of its parts
 Each part of a design is affected by what surrounds it
 By manipulating the interaction of the individual parts, you affect the cumulative perception
 Gestalt is the overall quality being described when you say “this design works”

Figure-ground contrast
One of the Gestalt principles of basic design
Our ability to distinguish what’s in the front of a document and what’s in the back
Allows us to discern what the main subject of a document is, and what’s just ‘background’.

Why Use Contrast?

1. Contrast creates interest on the page
2. Contrast can help organize your document’s information

There are several primary forms of contrast that designers typically use, including the following:
Content must be intelligently composed, and composition is defined by the information hierarchy, which is
defined with, you guessed it: contrast.

Repetition
Repetition can be defined as any repeated idea that provides unity: the repeated idea may be positioning, size,
colour, or use of rules, background tints, and boxes.

Repetition helps establish relationships among information elements, which eases a user’s interpretation and
understanding of a document. Repetition allows readers to see related items as groups, rather than disparate
chunks.

By having similar items recur in a regular way, you reduce the complexity of a document and reinforce how the
various elements in the design are related.

Colour tends to be a strong repetitive element, especially when the number of colours in a given document is
small.

Similarity of size is effective when the sizes of elements are clearly distinguishable from one another.

Similarity of shape is the weakest grouping strategy.

Alignment
The placement of elements such that edges line up along common rows or columns, or their bodies along a
common centre.

The arrangement of elements in such a way so that the natural lines (borders) created by them match up as
closely as possible. By doing so these elements become unified and form a greater whole.

Alignment is what ties the page together and creates immediate unity and organization / cohesion. It is one of
the most important design elements.

Every visual element should align with another element on the page, whether it’s left-, right-, or centre-aligned,
or horizontally or vertically aligned.
The simplest forms of alignment are left, rights, and centre alignment.

The majority of documents are also designed on a grid, or an invisible underlying structure of columns and
rows.
Proximity
Physical closeness implies a relationship: objects that are close together usually imply likeness or
similarity (i.e. are seen to be related). Distance implies difference.

Proximity creates related meaning: elements that are related should be grouped together, whereas separate
design elements should have enough space in between to communicate they are different.

White space / Negative space

 Any part of the page that doesn’t contain text or images
 Macro Whitespace: the space between major elements in a composition
 Micro Whitespace: the space between smaller elements (between list items, between a caption and an
image, between words and letters etc)
 Active whitespace: when whitespace is used to lead a reader from one element to another

Put more white space between items that don’t go together, and less space between items that do.

Compare the illustrations below, to see how proximity, white space, and Gestalt all work together to create
meaning from the simplest design element there is: the line.

vs

Design objects vs Principles of design

Design Objects
Any mark of group of marks that can be seen and manipulated on a page, including text. All of these objects
mark a positive space.

Negative space is the space between and around positive space.

Jacques Bertin – Seven visual variables we can use to manipulate objects in two dimensional design:

 Shape
 Orientation
 Texture
 Colour
 Value
 Size
 Position

Shape
The two-dimensional area covered or enclosed by an object.

“The universe of shapes is infinite”

Shapes have meaning based on convention or resemblance:

Value
Refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a design object

Size
Pica one-sixth of an inch
Point one-twelfth of a pica, or one seventy-second of an inch

1 inch = 6 picas = 72 points

Absolute size
Relative size

Week 4: Elements of Visual Design: BURPE

  Balance
 Unity
 Rhythm
 Proportion
 Emphasis

BALANCE
Formal / symmetrical balance
 Repeating similar shapes, colours, values, lines, or other elements.
 Having elements of equal weight on both sides of the design (mirror image)
 Often best for formal documents – formal balance seems safe / conservative / stable / classic.

Informal / asymmetrical balance

 Using dissimilar shapes with unequal visual weight to attract the eye
 The imaginary central pivot point is still present, but instead of mirror images on each side of the picture
area, the elements are notably different in size, shape, weight, tone, and placement.
 If you place something on the page, it needs to be balanced somewhere by something else on the page (but
not symmetrically)
 Dynamic / edgy

Radial balance
 In a radial (or circular) balance, elements radiate from a central point of the design. Imagine ripples tossed
into a pond.
 Useful when you want to maintain a central focal point.

Crystallographic balance
 Crystallographic balance results from all-over patters without a central focal point, creating equal emphasis
across the whole design.
 Same visual weight or attraction wherever you look at the design
 A strict grid structure works well
 Mosaic

UNITY
The coordination of design elements so that each works well with the others.
All aspects of a design complement one another rather than compete for attention

Consistency & harmony

Harmony – the right balance between repetition and uniqueness

RHYTHM
Rhythm creates movement and flow within a page, directing the viewer’s eyes in certain directions.

A sense of rhythm is created by placing a unifier on a page, such as a colour, pattern, or texture. A sense of
movement is created when the unifier is repeated throughout the space; the eye doesn’t stop on one piece, but
rather alights here and there on pieces of the unifier.
PROPORTION
Scale
Larger elements appear closer to the viewer; smaller elements appear to recede.

Placement
Elements in the bottom third of an image will appear closer.

Overlap
Elements appear to be in front of those that they overlap.

EMPHASIS
Controlling what stands out – what becomes the focal point.

When you emphasize a particular element – by making it larger, by framing it with white space, by adding a
bold colour, by placing it in a box – you’re alerting the user that it’s important in the overall design hierarchy.

Look away – look back. What did you notice first, second, third? Is that the order you want to emphasize
elements?
Week 5: Audience Analysis
Audiences used to be incredibly forgiving with information design. Nowadays they are becoming much less
forgiving of information design that doesn’t meet their needs.

Any document you create is going to be an “experience” for users. The better the experience, the higher the
value of the product and the better the interaction with the end user.

The Impact of Poor Design (Brent Henze)

Describing the process of attempting to use text or a manual to learn a new device or task:

 Task domain: characterizing the problem (problem setting vs problem

solving) e.g. how do I program my mobile phone?
 Interrogation domain: trying to match the problem to information available.
 Information domain: finding the answer to our problem.

Because the user has already been forced to stop their task to solve a problem, by the time they read the manual
they may already believe that the product may be unreliable. If they can’t quickly and easily find the answer,
they may decide the information domain doesn’t help much either.

These days we have the following goals for most information products:
 Meet my goals
 Make it easy
 Make it a pleasure
 Give me what I expect

Schemas and Mental Models

We are compelled to understand images. We immediately ask “what is it?” and “what does it mean?” Our brain
likes shortcuts. It tries to take the unknown and link it to the known. We’re always trying to build connections
and associations.

A schema is essentially a cognitive organizational method. The brain takes in new information and links it to
something we already know. Schemas are ‘abstract or generalized representations of objects and scenes…and
concepts and relationships between concepts.’ Good use of schemas helps people to understand something new
by accessing what they already understood.

Mental models are similar to schemas but are broader conceptualizations that explain cause and effect and how
changes in one object or phenomenon can cause changes in another.

With most documents, the audience expects certain verbal and visual forms and configurations. These forms
become the accepted and familiar way to communicate within the audience genre or paradigm.
Rhetorical Context
The rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, and context) should always command the design. Just because you
like something doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate design decision.

Audience Interaction with the Information Product

This is largely based on the psychological idea of Gestalt:

The whole is different than the sum of the parts

Combining things can give a different result than the simple elements may predict. These perception principles
are largely universal.

We humans look for and recognize patters, and we expect them to mean something. We also notice interruptions
in pattern, and expect those to mean something.

Anything that lacks order in visual displays makes us uncomfortable. So we mentally group individual parts to
form a whole.

We tend to be drawn to:

 Anything that moves
 Pictures of human faces, especially if they are looking right at us
 Pictures of food, sex, or danger
 Stories
 Loud noises
 The colour red

Some Gestalt Guidelines

 Limit the content and elements in the design to what your audience needs.
 Group related information to show it is related.
 Arrange information from most important to least.

Users Like Stories

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual
fabric, such as a narrative
- Steven Pinker

We like stories. We can’t resist them. You can use stories to help people use your product, to understand it,
remember it, to enjoy it, to learn from it, to accomplish a goal with it. The truth is, a relatable narrative is just
another schema or mental model.

Many users are actually readers in disguise. And readers like a good story.

Over time, the recognition that interactive media is a text has devolved. The original webpages were difficult to
create; the vast majority of people who bothered to learn “tagging” in SGML and HTML were programmers,
who do not see hypermedia elements as text, so they established production metaphors compatible with
construction and assembly. Technical communicators bought into the programmers’ structural metaphors.

When the digital universe is viewed from the perspective of the document metaphor, it is then possible to more
clearly discern the many genres.

Social media has seen a newfound interest in storytelling for business. Companies went from talking about
products to talking about what users were doing with them.

Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving,
gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short
stories, epics, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, paintings, stained-glass windows, movies local
news, conversation….

Tacit knowledge is considered particularly problematic for knowledge management, because it is difficult to
represent as propositions or rules. Narratives or stories, on the other hand, are particularly effective for storing
and retrieving tacit knowledge (or completely unstructured data).

Purposes of Narrative
1. Sensemaking: reducing and understanding the complexity, ambiguity, and unpredictability of what
happens in an organization.

2. Communication: experience is reconstituted, made meaningful.

3. Politics and Power: narratives are the conduits through which authority is legitimized.

4. Learning and change: narratives are vehicles which organizations use to introduce change

5. Identity and identification: narratives support the ethos of the organization, and establish a sense of
community.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten

- Rudyard Kipling

Generic document narrative (DN) of a typical technical document

 This is the background to the problem
 Here’s the problem
 Here’s our solution
 And the motivation that led us to find this solution

Narrative for Digital Communication

Web content can’t simply be ‘dropped’ into the site post-design; it needs to be built up in the correct order:
story, content, and then, finally, design.

The “pyramid principle” of document planning posits that the Introduction section of the document is supported
by the rest of the document’s contents, all other sections of the pyramid lying below.

The pyramid principle would prescribe a structure for the introduction itself that is narrative in nature:

Situation: the current state of the subject

Complication: complication to this state
Question: the question that the document answers
Answer: the answer to this question

The trick to getting good stories in your research is to make the time for them.

Personas and Scenarios

A persona is a brief profile of a typical user that outlines specific personality attributes, desires, needs, habits,
and capabilities. They can be fictional, a composite, or representative of a typical user. If you have many kinds
of users, you’ll probably need to create a series of personas. Most projects require about three to five. It helps to
have a picture of each character, and a name. Personas should represent the goals and needs of the people who
use your product.

Personas can be a budget-conscious, time-sensitive, device to help you and your team make decisions about the
project. A single person can create personas, but the act of creating personas is a great team-building exercise at
the start of the project.
First, identify your main audience types. Research the client’s business landscape.
A scenario can be a story written in narrative form, or another form such as a diagram or flowchart. Once the
cast is complete (the personas), having them act out the process of interacting with the information design in
question helps you identify specific patterns in how they interact with it.

Stories for Requirements Development

The use of stories instead of voluminous business and functional requirements for quickly and effectively
articulating the most salient must-haves out of any potential set of client requirements has become popularized
by the practitioners of Agile (especially the Scrum vatiety) product development methodology.

When to Tell a Visual Story

 Need to explain how new software functions? Create a flowchart.
 Need to show how a procedure can change depending on decisions made along
the way? Add a decision chart.
 Screenshots are a great way to develop a visual narrative.
 When writing instructions, it’s good to present sample scenarios of tasks and how to
accomplish them.
 If you’re introducing users to a new concept, try to think of an anecdote that can
relate the new concept to something they already understand.
 Visual design is about video too. 

s
Getting and Keeping Your Audience’s Attention
Talking to the Elephant
The rider part of your brain is the rational, Mr. Spock, control-your-impulses, plan-for-the-future brain. We have
a tendency to overestimate the rider’s control.

The elephant, on the other hand, is your attracted-to-shiny-objects, what-the-hell, go-with-what-feels-right part
of the brain. It’s drawn to things that are novel, pleasurable, comfortable, or familiar.

The rider can force the elephant to pay attention. There’s a cost to this, though. We have to expend a lot of
willpower to make it happen, and willpower gets used up pretty quickly. The cognitive resources of memory,
focus, and control are finite. You can control the elephant, but just not for very long.

Getting the Elephant’s Attention

1. Use Urgency
2. Show, Don’t Tell
This is one of the golden rules of fiction writing and movie making: avoid heavy-handed exposition, and use
visuals, action, and dialogue instead.

3. Tell a Compelling Story

Use classic storytelling elements to create a compelling scenario:
Have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish a goal.
Have an antagonist who is preventing the protagonist from accomplishing that goal. Have obstacles
along the way that the protagonist must overcome.
Have an inciting incident that sets up the drama of the story.

4. Create Interesting Dilemmas

5. Surprise
People seem to react more strongly to unexpected rewards

6. Leave Information Out

George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology, describes curiosity as:
arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the
feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to
reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.

7. Create Dissonance
Another form of surprise happens when we bump into something that doesn’t match to our view of the world.

8. Make It Visceral
One way to engage the elephant is to make the experience visceral and real using emotional context or physical
interaction with real tangible objects and people

9. Tell It All the Other Elephants Are Doing It

From Amazon reviews to street crowds to topics on Twitter, we are more willing to investigate if other people
(particularly other people we know or respect) are already engaged.
Week 6: Typefaces
A font is a complete set of the characters, punctuation, numerals, and glyphs of a particular typeface.
Times New Roman is a typeface.
Times New Roman 10-point italic is a font.

 Type is usually measured in points—there are 72 points per inch (approximately 0.35mm per point).
 Font size is measured from the top of the highest ascender, to the bottom of the lowest descender.
 Other measures of type include ems, picas, mms, ex’s, and pixels.
 The baseline is the bottom line.
 There are an estimated 200 000 fonts today.
 In font lingo, hairline strokes refer to the thin lines. Stem strokes refer to the thick ones.

There are basically two cases for fonts, as well as small caps: uppercase, lowercase, and small capitals:

The terms uppercase and lowercase come from the way printing used to be done, using moveable metal type that
was stored in shallow trays, or cases. The big letters were in the upper case, the small letters in the lower one.

Kerning
The horizontal space between each character.

In advertising, training documents, and in online copy, text with exceptionally wide kerning is often used to
slow down the reader, to make the statement or message more memorable. The wider kerning forces the reader’s
eye to take time to read it.

Type that is set too loosely (wide character spacing), creates striped patterns that distract the reader from the
material.

Type that is set too tightly (narrow, compressed character spacing)) encourages vertical eye movement, so
readers may lose their place.
X-height
The x-height is the size of the height of a lowercase letter x in that typeface, measured from the baseline to the
height of a lowercase x. The x height is a determining factor when you lay out, or set, type. All other
measurements, configurations, and layout are influenced by the x-height, because it conveys the visual impact of
the type size.

Leading
 Space between lines of type (it used to be made of lead).
 Measured from baseline to baseline: line spacing of 20-point means 20 points of space between the
baselines of each line.
 The default leading is 120% of the point size of the type. For example, 12-point type would be set with a
leading of 14.4 points (written as 12 /14.4).
 Type is often described as the point size of the text over the leading size. For example, 12 /16 means 12-
point text set 16 points apart.
 Smaller fonts require more leading to be legible.
 The larger the x-height, the more leading is required because the reader needs more space to recognize the
word shapes.
 On long pages of body text, increasing the line spacing of text improves readability, e.g. 10-point text with
14-point leading rather than the default 12-point
 Large heading or display type will likely require less leading in proportion to the text size.
 In diagrams and such where text annotations or labels are treated more as “chunks” that need to be kept
together, reducing the line spacing can improve understanding e.g. 9-point annotation text with 9- or 10-
point leading rather than the default 10.5-point.

Font Types
Type 1 Fonts (also called Postscript fonts)
 One of the oldest formats.
 Come in two separate files: the screen font and the printer font.
 By Adobe.

Truetype fonts
 Only one file, which contains both the screen font and the printer font.
 There are no issues trying to print TrueType fonts to non-Postscript printers
 All fonts pre-installed on Macintosh computers running OS X are a variation of TrueType fonts called
dfonts.

OpenType fonts
 Collaboration between Adobe and Microsoft – OpenType fonts work on both Mac and PC
 All the fonts that are pre-installed on Windows machines are OpenType fonts.
 Consist of a single file
 OpenType fonts are cross-platform, contain vastly expanded character sets, and much more. It is
recommended to choose OpenType fonts if possible.

ClearType fonts
 Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista.
 Optimized for online use (like Verdana and Georgia)
Established type foundries
 International Type Corporation (ITC)
 Bitstream (BT)
 Adobe
 Monotype (MT)

Styling Fonts
The term “styling fonts” refers to the automatic italic or bold commands in your software to change a font to its
italic or bold versions. Be aware that this may be different to selecting the actual style name from the font menu.
When you click the style control for italic or bold, if the font style exists, the software changes the font to its
relevant version (italic, bold etc). If no font style exists, the typeface gets slanted to the right, or darkened ibn a
clumsy way. This is not an actual italic or bold typeface however, it’s a fake! Most designers know enough to
not use such a fake font. It looks bad.

Small Caps Styling

If the font is an OpenType Pro font, the small caps style will substitute the proper small caps version of the
characters. If the font isn’t an OpenType Pro font, the small caps style converts all the text to capitals and then
reduces the size of the lowercase letters. This males the lowercase capitals look wrong next to the uppercase
capitals.

Legibility and Readability

Legibility is a function of typeface design. It’s an informal measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter
from another in a particular typeface.

Readability is dependent on how the typeface is used. Readability is about typography. It is a gauge of how
easy words, phrases, and blocks of copy can be read. It is possible to take a very legible typeface and render it
unreadable through poor typographic arrangement.

Type’s main purpose is balancing the readability and legibility of your message.

With sans fonts, each character is completely separate, there’s more white space which is why some find it more
readable. Then again, some people argue that the serifs that connect letters in serif fonts do the same thing.

Choosing a Typeface
The 7 Types Styles

Four kinds of reading purposes

 Reading to enjoy: pleasure of engaging with the content
 Reading to assess: evaluating the relevance or value of the content
  Reading to do: using the document to perform a task
 Reading to learn to do: reading to acquire background knowledge required to
do something else

When considering which type to use for an information product, try to think what kind of reading your audience
is likely to be doing when using the product. Your audience analysis should give you the information required to
assess the kind of reading in question.

The Persona of Typeface

Sans serif faces are typically perceived to have a cleaner, more modern look, more technical, possibly because
of its “clean, machine-like look of modernism”

Serif typefaces
 Times New Roman is seen as bookish and traditional.
 Garamond is seen as graceful, refined, and confident.
 Carlson is attractive but not pretentious, quietly dignified and friendly, “a good substantial citizen”

Sans Serif typefaces

Fewer affective characteristics are generally attributed to sans serif typefaces, but these typefaces are still seen
as having distinct personas:
 Futura is described as no-nonsense, cool, and restrained.
 AvantGarde is modern, without being formal.

Choosing Type Combinations: Concordance, Contrast, and Conflict

Concordance
Use one type family throughout your document.

Doesn’t provide a lot of contrast, as it only relies on the different weights (e.g. roman, bold, and italic) to
differentiate between the headings and body type.

Contrast
Use typefaces from drastically different families, e.g. sans serif heading with serif type.

Make sure to choose typefaces that are sufficiently different. The easiest way to do this is to choose two
different styles of type. Contrast is the most widely used type combination.

Conflict
Choosing two typefaces of the same style.

Not enough contrast is created, yet concordance is not in evidence either.

General Typeface Guidelines
 Choose typefaces that have similar x-heights and similar lengths of ascenders and descenders.
 Use no more than two typefaces (usually a serif and sans serif), and definitely no more than three.
 Choose a typeface that was designed for the purpose.
 Align text to “right ragged”
 Choose typefaces with a tall x-height.
 If you can, use OpenType fonts; they are cross platform, contain vastly expanded character sets, and much
more. If you can’t find an OpenType font that suits you, use a TyueType font instead.
 Choose a typeface for the body text first
 Headings – you can go for more readability to draw the reader in; legibility isn’t as important as there is less
content
 Body – should be as legible as possible, because it makes up the most content
 Ensure that the typeface that provides the most contrast to the paper or background is the typeface that you
use for key pieces of information.

If you are electronically sharing or publishing documents, there is a hidden barb to using non-default typefaces
in your documents and webpages. If your audience doesn’t have the same typeface installed, then their
computer will substitute some other face that is installed. The exception is PDF, though you must usually ensure
the fonts are embedded.

In online documents, sans serif faces are now considered the norm for body text. But in the early days of the
web, during the mid 1990s, most websites used a serif face like Times for all the body text. Websites using such
faces today are often considered old-fashioned, and even untrustworthy.

Basics of Clear Layout

Three important variables are type size, column width, and space between lines (leading).

1. Type Size
Point size alone is an uncertain guide to how big the type appears. x-height is a better guide to legibility than
point size. Provided the x-height is 1.5mm or more, printed type will be highly legible to those with normal
eyesight under good reading conditions. For a mass audience though, 1.8mm is more reasonable.

2. Column Width
For large areas of text on paper, most layout professionals reckon that the optimum column width is 50-70
characters (letters and spaces). This means about 8 to 12 words per line.

A common mistake is to set small type across too wide a column, say 170mm on an A4 page. The result could
me more than a hundred characters to the line, unless the type is correspondingly big.

3. Leading
Normally there needs to be some leading, otherwise users tire easily and make mistakes locating the start of
lines. Generally, the wider the column, the more leading is needed. Typefaces with a large x-height relative to
their type size need the full allowance of leading; those with smaller x-height tend to need less.

White Space
Allow generous margins and reasonable space between columns

Use highlighting weights sparingly

If you emphasize too much, nothing will be emphasized. If too many words are in bold, pages look spotty or
dazzling and the reader will find concentration difficult.

Hierarchy of Headings
The strength and position of headings should reflect the job they are being asked to do. Chapter headings will
usually be much stronger than subheadings, which will in turn be much stronger than paragraph heads.
Week 7: Layouts & Grids
Information design is a good blend of rules and creativity, with an emphasis on the former.

The Golden Ratio (phi)

The proportion 8:13
The ratio 1:1.618
Also known as the golden section and the golden rectangle.
A relationship that occurs between two number when the ration of the smaller to the larger is the same as the
ratio of the larger to the sum of the two.

Fibonacci Sequence
Along with the golden ration is the Fibonacci number sequence, which reflects the proportions established by
the ratio. Each number is the sum of the two proceeding it:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…

The Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is a proportion technique mostly known and used by photographers.

Imagine an image or page evenly divided into nine parts created by two evenly spaced horizontal lines and two
evenly spaced vertical lines. The rule states that anything you want to be the focus, or emphasized, should be
placed on either the lines or the intersection of the lines, which are known as ‘hotspots’.

Following the rule encourages photographers and designers to avoid placing things dead centre in a layout,
which can result in a much less dynamic and interesting picture. This is why the subject of a professional photo
is often off-centre.

How Users Read

Most often the eye looks for an entrance into the document from the top left, and then scans diagonally down to
the bottom right. So what we might call the central location of the page is not necessarily the centre.

NOTE: How users scan the page is largely dependent on what you’ve emphasized and where you’ve placed key
items such as images and navigation menus.

Web vs Print
Research has shown that most users view web pages in an F-pattern; they scan across the top of the page in two
‘stripes’ and then scan down the left side of the page, in search of the information they need.

Otherwise users tend to view webpages in much the same way they view print. However, users tend to devote
less attention to most websites than they do printed documents – it’s all too easy to jump ship to the next website
if the current one doesn’t give you immediate visual cues to the location of the information you want.

The Grid
A good reason for using the grid is consistency, which is especially important on larger documents. It also
makes the design process easier. It simplifies decision-making, which allows you to make more efficient use of
your time.

You can have more than one grid. Your front page could be based on a five column grid while inside pages with
ads on a six column. There is no one right way.
Designers typically set an amount of margin space around the edge of a page, and split the remaining area up
into a series of even columns and / or rows. The column width is governed by the page width, the type size, and
the number of words or characters per line.

If the contents, illustrations, and amount of text vary from one page to the next, a flexible grid is needed. Grids
with an odd number of columns – 3 or 5 in particular – allow the greatest amount of flexibility.

Layout Sins: 13 Amateur Errors

1. Centering Everything
In general, avoid centered layouts. Left or right aligned layouts give the viewer’s eye a nice straight vertical line
on the right or the left to follow top to bottom. Centered layouts have no such line. The eye bounces around in
search of the next eye entry point.

2. Warped or Naked Photos

Warped Photos
You must resize pictures in proportion to their original size. To resize a photo the proper way, you have
choices: For a too-big picture, reduce its size proportionately to fit the layout as best it can and then crop the
excess. For a too-small picture, enlarge it proportionately to fit the layout as best it can before cropping the
excess.

Naked Photos
A naked photo is a photograph that needs a border. Not all photos need borders. But some do. If you can’t
tell where the photo begins or ends because the photo color blends with the color of the screen or paper,
then the photo probably needs a border to mark its edges. If one photo in your layout needs a border, then
give all your photos the same border to be consistent.

3. Too Many Fonts

Try to stick to two per layout.

4. Bulky Borders & Boxes

Use negative space to group or separate things. If you must use a border or box, choose an understated one.

5. Cheated or Missing Margins

Be generous with margins, including inset and offset for text and picture boxes. Margins inside a text box are
called inset. Margins outside a text box or picture box are referred to as offset.

6. Stairstepping
Keep headlines in a straight line.

7. Corners & Clutter

Clutter: Bad.
Clustering: Good.

8. Trapped Negative Space

Push extra negative space to the outside edges of your layout.

9. Busy Backgrounds
Design backgrounds as negative space. Save tiling for the bathroom.

10. Tacky Type Emphasis

Think twice about reversing, stroking, using all caps or underlining.
Type in ALL CAPS has no ascenders or descenders and so requires the reader to do a little extra decoding. If
you want to use all caps, make sure they don’t interfere with your visual communication purpose. And don’t
even think about using all caps for body copy.

Never underline type to emphasize it. The only correct time to underline text is to communicate a live hyperlink.

11. Bad Bullets

Use real bullets for lists, and use hanging indents to properly align lists.

12. Widows & Orphans

Avoid inelegant breaks at the top and bottom of legs of type.

13. Justified Rivers

Avoid unsightly rivers of negative space flowing through legs of justified type.
Align your text flush left/ragged right instead.

ISO sizes
A0, A1, A2, A3, A4 etc

Full bleed
Printing right up to the edge of the page
Week 8: Evaluating Design Problems
Never show a difficult client only one idea.

If they’ve asked to do a dumb thing, don’t tell them that. Every design problem has a solution, or three—you
just have to find it. It will be better if you explain the challenges presented and give them an opportunity to see
how clever you are to solve them.

Pick two or three of your best ideas and present the pros and cons for each to your client. And don’t SHOW
them results. Describe the design issues and ideas that led to the results and how they can be resolved. Instead of
saying “this looks best” say something like “your audience is mostly in their late 80s and may have trouble
reading fine type, so this solution, where I’ve increased the point sizer, will help them read it better”. You
always want to frame the discussion in terms of the audience and what will help them.

Break it Down
To handle a huge pile of information, you must first understand the kinds of information involved. Evaluate
each part and rank it according to levels of importance and its role in the document. Then lay out and add design
elements like CRAP and BURPE to the piece in ways that make these distinctions clear to the reader.

Some important points to think about:

 Is there content that could be transformed into a heading?
 Is there other high-level content that could become a brief introduction?
 Identify primary content that can remain as body text
 Separate secondary content that could be relegated to a sidebar or feature box
 Is there content that really isn’t necessary and could be rewritten, moved into an appendix, or left out?
 Look for content that could be converted to visual images

Visually separating content can be a useful idea.

Removing the formatting and returning to plain text helps reduce any predetermined “weight” that may have
been given to some information.

Good Design Rules

 Communicate—don’t decorate
 Speak with one visual voice
 Pick colours on purpose
 If you can do it with less, then do it
 Negative space is magical – create it, don’t just fill it up
 Treat type as image, as though it’s just as important
 Be universal, remember that it’s not all about you
 Be decisive, do it on purpose or don’t do it at all
 Measure with your eyes; design is visual
 Key with any document—print it out
 Get feedback from other people
 Keep the layout simple
 Make the most important element dominate
 Use an obvious and logical visual flow

Structural Overviews
Because information design projects often have a deeper level of complexity and volume of information than
other design projects, you will probably need to create one or more supporting documents to aid you in the
process before you begin visual design.
Sitemaps
With projects that include very deep layers of information (such as websites, exhibitions, complex publications
etc), you’ll be doing your visual design team a huge disservice if there is no overall map of the project from a
structural point of view. A sitemap should be created long before visual design begins. Sitemaps are
foundational tools of information architecture.

Sitemaps are most commonly found in the world of web and interactive design. In this context, a sitemap is an
invaluable tool in helping the project team figure out the overall site structure, navigation flow, and navigation
nomenclature. A well-organized sitemap gives you an at-a-glance view of the entire site, with all its main
sections, pages, and sublevel pages.

Research and Testing

Testing is really just another form of research. With the initial research (audience analysis, purpose, rhetorical
context etc) you set the direction, gather requirements, and lay the foundation for the project. Testing throughout
the design development cycle ensures that the design becomes more and more focused toward getting it right.
With user-centered design, you build the feedback look into your design process from the start.

Resist the Urge Not to Test.

Testing saves money. If you do it from the beginning, the project may cost a bit more, but it will end up saving
money in the long run. The likelihood of “getting it right” in version 1.0 will go up exponentially the more
research testing you do.

Testing isn’t Make-work.

The best approach is to stop thinking of testing as an extra option, and present it as a necessary, integrated part
of the process. Make it standard practice. Clients are likely to be more receptive if you explain that testing is
simply part of your regular production process.

Testing and Politics

Testing takes some of the politics out of the decision-making process during projects. Is there a sacred cow?
Something that you think isn’t a good idea, that perhaps the client insists on integrating into the project despite
your projects? Don’t argue, test!

Test Iteratively
Test early and often. At project inception, find a selection of representative users and set up a regular testing
schedule. Set aside a couple of hours each week for a simple informal test. Don’t try to test everything at once.
Test individual segments of your design. Test whatever is ready at the time. If you’re working on a website, test
just the navigation titles one week. The next week test a set of icons.

Prototypes and Testing Tools

Testing tools don’t have to be fancy. Simple paper prototypes are fine, especially during the early stages in the
project. Take good notes and / or perhaps record the audio to catalog your users results (you can use video but
you don’t have to). Once you’ve mapped out a good portion of the user experience of the information design,
you can conduct more elaborate testing with advanced prototypes. Even during advanced testing, it’s best to
keep things simple and test one thing at a time.

Types of User Research and Testing

Different types of testing can occur during all project phases. At times you’ll want to employ all testing types in
a project. Sometimes you’ll need only one or two types of testing.

 Concept Tests
 Design Testing
 Focus Groups
 Usability Testing
 Beta Testing and Performance Testing
 User Acceptance Testing
Week 9: Colour Theory
Hue
Hue is the dominant wavelength. Hue describes a dimension of colour we experience when we look at a colour
in its purest form; it essentially refers to a colour having full saturation.

Primary Colours
Primary colours are sets of colours that can be combined to make a useful range of colours. For human
applications, three primary colours are typically used, since human colour vision is usually trichromatic.
Different colours models have different primary colours. The combination of any two primary colours creates a
secondary colour.

 RGB / Additive Colour Model

For additive combination of colours, as in electronic visual displays, the primary colours normally used are red,
green, and blue.

In light, all three of these wavelengths added together at full strength produces pure white light.
The absence of all three of these colours produces complete darkness, or black.

 CMY / Subtractive Colour Model

For a subtractive combination of colours, as in mixing of pigments or dyes for printing, the colours magenta,
yellow, and cyan are normally used. Before the colour names cyan and magenta were in common use, these
primaries were often known as blue-green and purple.

 RYB Colour Model

Red, yellow, and blue (RYB) are primarily used in art and art education, particularly painting. RYB predates
modern scientific colour theory.

RYB make up the primary colours in a painter's colour wheel; the secondary colours OGV (orange, green, and
violet) make up another triad. Triads are formed by 3 equidistant colours on a particular colour wheel; neither
RYB nor OGV is equidistant on a perceptually uniform colour wheel, but have been defined to be equidistant in
the RYB wheel.

Red, yellow, and blue primaries cannot mix all other colours, although this dogma has survived in colour
theory to the present day. Using red, yellow, and blue as primaries yields a relatively small gamut, in which,
among other problems, colourful greens, cyans, purples, and magentas are impossible to mix, because red,
yellow, and blue do not correspond to the subtractive primaries dictated by human colour vision.
Additive Colour Mixing (RGB) Subtractive Colour Mixing (CMY)

The most commonly used additive colour primaries are the secondary colours of the most commonly used
subtractive colour primaries, and vice versa (see above)

The RYB Colour Model

Primary Colours: Red, Yellow, & Blue Secondary Colours: Orange, Green, & Purple

Created by mixing together primary colours

Tertiary Colours Complimentary Colours

Created by mixing a primary colour Directly opposite each other on the wheel
with an adjacent secondary colour
The 12-Step Colour Wheel (RYB)

Choosing Harmonious Colours

Complimentary colours are directly opposite each other on the wheel. Complimentary colours contrast against
each other, but they also tend to “vibrate”. This can either excite or annoy a user’s eye.
Value (“brightness” / “luminosity”)
Value is the lightness or darkness of a colour. It indicates the quantity of light reflected.
When referring to pigments, dark values with black added are called “shades” of the given hue name. Light
values with white pigment added are called “tints” of the hue name.

All high saturation colours have medium values, because light and dark colours are achieved by mixing with
white or black.

Saturation (“intensity” or “chroma”)

Saturation is the purity of a colour. It refers to the dominance of hue in the colour. High saturation colours look
rich and full. Low saturation colours look dull and greyish.

Note: The terms chroma and saturation, and the terms value, brightness and luminosity are not exactly
synonymous. All of them have precise definitions, and each is used for specific purposes in technical
applications.

Psychology of Colour
Warm colours: red, orange, yellow
Cold colours: blue, green, violet

Remember that colour is relative in meaning. Men tend to choose bright colours. Women prefer softer ones.
Children and the elderly prefer more intense hues.
Computer Colour Modes

Bitmap Colour Mode (1-bit images)

Pure black and pure white—no colours or shades of grey.
Don’t confuse ‘bitmap colour mode’ with bitmap images (images that you can edit pixel by
pixel). It’s still ‘bitmapped’ in the sense that you can edit the file in an image-editing program
pixel by pixel, it’s just that all of the pixels are either black or white.
If you scan a 1-bit image, the scanner only captures black and white data (some scanner
software calls this newspaper mode).

Threshold
When you scan an image in bit map colour mode, any grey tones in the image are converted to black or white.
The scanner evaluates how light or dark the shades of grey are: if a grey is above a certain level, it’s converted
to black; if below the same level, it’s converted to white. This is called the threshold; you can set the threshold
level. Lowering the threshold means only darker greys will convert to black; increasing the threshold means
lighter greys will also convert to black.

Uses: scanning signatures, sheet music, bank statements & various bills and letters.

Greyscale Mode
Greyscale is an 8-bit mode. There are 254 different shades of grey, plus solid black and solid white, for a total of
256 tones.
(Note that a lot of old photos or movies that are referred to as “black and white” are actually greyscale, as they
contain all sorts of grey tones.)

Uses: “black and white” photograph, “black and white” sketches / illustrations with shades of grey in them, such
as pencil or charcoal; colour photos / illustrations that you are going to reproduce in black and white.

Do not scan as greyscale any line art images (such as cartoons) that need to have sharp edges. It makes it
difficult to see small details in the image.
Two ways to fix this: you can scan the image as a 1-bit image with a high resolution, or you can scan it as a
greyscale image and then convert it to a high resolution 1-bit image.

RGB Mode
Scanners use RGB to capture colour images. They capture the varying levels of all the red, green, and blue data
in an image. Each set of colour information is called a channel. When the three channels of colour are
combined, the result is the full-colour image.

Each of these RGB channels contains 256 shades of colour, so there are 256 shades of red, 256 shades of green,
and 256 shades of blue. The three channels put together create 24-bit colour (3 channels times 8 bits), allowing
for more than 16.7 million colours.

Choosing colours in RGB

You can never tell exactly what a colour on the screen will look like when printed on paper.

Computer monitors use RGB, commercial printers use CMYK colours. There will always be a shift in colours
from RGB to CMYK, it’s physically impossible for them to appear exactly the same because they use
completely different physics to display colour. Some colours shift quite dramatically when converted from RGB
to CMYK.
Some programs indicate which colours can’t be printed in the CMYK process. These colours are called out of
gamut, which in this case means they’re out of the range of CMYK. The symbol might be something like a
small alert symbol. Some programs let you click on the alert symbol to switch to the closest “legal” colour, or
you can adjust the colour yourself until the alert symbol disappears.
Even if you print to a speciality printer that uses RGB inks, the colours won’t look exactly the same as they do
on the screen, for the same physical reasons—light vs reflection. They will usually be closer than CMYK inks
however.

CMYK Mode
Cyan, magenta, yellow, black. CMYK colours are also called process colours (printing with CMYK is called
four-colour printing, or process printing).

The CMYK model is based on what happens with light and objects out in the world, rather than in a monitor. A
light source such as the sun or a light bulb send down white light, objects around us absorb certain colours of the
spectrum and reflect others back to our eyes. When light hits a red apple, the apple absorbs (subtracts) all the
colours of the light except the red, and the red is reflected into our eyes. Hence CMYK is a subtractive model.

100% of CMY creates black.

100% of RGB creates white.

When working with CMYK colour on the computer:

The image is shown to you in RGB colour, obviously
The number of colours that can be printed with CMYK is significantly less than 16.7 million

You should get a process colour book or commercial colour guide from a company such as Pantone, Tru-
Match, or Agfa. Then:

1. Choose a colour from the process colour guide

2. Write down the name of the colour (if it’s from a printed colour book) or the CMYK values
3. Look for the name of the colour in the colour picker of your software, or specify the CMYK values.

Which Modes for Photography and Scanning?

Digital cameras take photos in RGB colour mode. Scanners scan in RGB mode. Once you have the image (from
the camera or scanner) you can convert it into a CMYK file before you put it into your page-layout software.

It’s a good idea to keep the image in RGB while working in image editing programs such as Photoshop for three
reasons:

1. RGB images are smaller than their CMYK equivalents

2. Some effects and filters in Photoshop etc are only available in RGB
3. Converting back and forth causes some loss of information in the image. The conversion from RGB tp
CMYK should be the very last thing you do to an image.
Process Colour Printing
Process is a description applied to the four transparent ink colours that are combined to make full-colour images:
cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Black is added because the black created by CMY is a muddy dark brown.

Printing presses print dots. To make full colour images, the press combines yellow dots and cyan dots to make
green, magenta dots and yellow dots to create red, and so on.

CMYK is defined in terms of what percentage of each of C, M, Y, and K are used:

0:0:0:100 black (0% CMY, 100% K)

C:0, M:0, Y:0, K:100 black (another CMYK annotation)

Use only CMYK colours for printing.

RGB colours will come out differently, aggravate printers, and can mess up files so they don’t print properly.

Spot Colours (AKA specialty, Pantone, custom, flat, solid, second colour)
Spot colour refers to any other single colour other than CMYK that is printed on paper. Below are some of the
attributes of spot printing:

 Cheaper than process printing

 Used for colour matching: it’s very common to match the colours in company logos. The red used by Coca
Cola is a spot colour. The American Express Card green is a spot colour (hence the term specialty or
custom colours)
 Metallic effects
 Flourescent effects
 Tints (lighter colour versions of a colour)
 Mixing inks
 Colourizing photos

Defining spot colours: instead of choosing process colour setting, just set the colour type as spot colour.

Use a spot colour guide to find the correct colour, not the screen.

8 Rules of Colour
 Convey information: select colours that elicit correct responses
 Create colour harmony
 Attract and hold attention
 Context is everything. Colour is always seen in context: proximity to another colour, the
environment surrounding the colour etc.
 Experimentation is the key
 People can see colour differently
 Assist in mnemonic value
 Think about composition
Week 10: Navigation Cues
Research into how people interact with print and online documents on a daily basis at work and home inevitably
says they mostly don’t read in any depth. Scanning, searching, and filtering are the main behaviours. Much of
the reading people do is mostly looking for something. The information design term for finding your way
around a document is navigation.

Print navigation tools include: Web navigation tools include:

 Page numbers Icons
 Running headers and footers Hyperlinks
 Colour-coded page tabs Breadcrumbs
 Contents pages and indexes Page titles
 Chapter titles Headers / footers
Tabs
Search boxes
Pull-down menus

Rule of thumb: put navigation items in a place familiar to your audience

The secret to headings is contrast. Variations in colour and size are two good ways of handling contrast for
headings.

The rule of 7 implies that, due to human cognitive abilities, you should limit main points, choices, and other
bits of information to seven (+ / - 2)

Visual Thinking
Visual Thinking (Rudolf Armheim, 1969)
Visual thinking assumes seeing and thinking are combined operations.

1. Vision is selective.
Users pay the most attention to the things that change as they work through a text. Changes on the page should
reflect new information.

2. Fixation solves a problem

Human beings are able to fixate selectively. As designers, we should assume users are trying to solve a problem
as they view a text. To aid selective fixation, remove unnecessary clutter from a design, and put useful bits at the
forefront.

3. Discernment in depth: an object and its context are mutually exclusive

When you look at an object up close, its context becomes unfocused; as you move further away, it becomes
unfocused but its context becomes clearer.

While users may need wider contextual clues at the beginning of a document (table of context, statement of
purpose, definitions etc), they should be minimized as the user gets further into the document.

4. Shapes are concepts

Humans learn to recognise consistent shapes in their environment—visual shapes should be simple, consistently
used, and familiar. Strange or unfamiliar shapes will slow the user down.

Symbols and icons

Icons are meant to be recognized, not read, which means they should provoke an immediate meaning or
recognition for the user. Their interpretation will often depend on where they’re located.

When their meaning is clear & their design simple, symbols have advantages over words, as they:
 Speak to people of any language
 Are compact, so they work in a much smaller space
 Are recognizable over longer distance
 Can be read quickly

Using colour to aid navigation

A common technique is to mark each chapter with a different colour, and use that colour thematically
throughout the chapter, in headings, top or side tabs, sidebar boxes etc.

A common problem is too many colours. To avoid this, the best solution is to define a limited colour palette at
the beginning of the design process.

Don’t forget about the emotional and nonverbal aspects of colour.

Designing Forms
In form design, the objective is rapid communication. A well-designed form should be easy to fill out, in a
logical sequence, and with sufficient space for user input.

Some good information to gather before beginning:

 What is the basic function of the form?
 Who will be using the form?
 What information is absolutely necessary and what is optional?
 What are the back-end or business processes behind the form?
 What potential areas for confusion exist?

Once you have this information:

 Make sure the purpose of the form is clear to the user
 Clearly divide the form into specific areas
 Provide clear instructions
 Keep tick / selection boxes close to their descriptions
 Use colour to distinguish sections of the form, but don’t overdo it
 Use plain language for novice users, and carefully chosen jargon or specialized vocabulary for domain
experts
 Usability test it

Writing for Information-rich Websites

What’s the problem on most websites?

The content is: The writing has:

 Not user-focused  Too many unnecessary words
 Not what users need  Sentences and paragraphs that are too long
 Poorly organized  Not enough visual appeal

Guidelines for Clear Writing on the Web

1. Focus on users and their scenarios (their tasks, goals, stories)
2. Include only what users want and need – in as few words as possible
3. Don’t expect users to read much – especially on “scan, select, and move on” pages
4. Take advantage of the web: break up the information
5. Think “information” or “topics”, not documents or handbooks
6. Outline and use lots of headings (questions often make good headings)
What is the first question users will ask?
When I have answered that, what is the next question?
Write the questions as headings, from the users point of view
7. Even in prose, use short sentences and paragraphs
A chunk on the web needs to be even smaller than on paper
8. Take advantage of the web: layer information
Layering in navigation
Successive menus
Hierarchy in a table of contents
Layering in content
Overview and branches
Summary and details
9. Use tables for “if, then” or “to do this, do this” sentences

Start with Three Scenarios

1. Why have a website? Measurable business goals
2. Who will (or should) come? Users
3. When and why will they come Users’ tasks, goals, and stories
Don’t be afraid to give up the prose. Sometimes, the right approach is to get out of prose mode.
Week 11: Maximising Meaning with Images
The increasing amount of information aimed at us in the modern world is driving the need to communicate
quickly. Speed is becoming increasingly important. Well-chosen pictures can get a message across faster than
describing it with words.

When trying to decide on including a picture, you need to assess benefit vs effort. Ask yourself:
 Will the picture add significantly to the document’s ability to communicate well?
 Will it cost more than the document is worth?
 Does your audience or document genre require a certain level of illustrative content?

When it comes to graphical interfaces, like software and the web, the number one complaint is that the interface
is too busy. This suggests less is best, and pictures need to be used with caution. One example is screen captures.
Some people go a bit mad as soon as they have access to screen capture software, or find out how to do it with
basic free tools.

Once you’ve decided a picture is in order…

Break Down Tasks

1. Begin with the object in its original or introductory state
2. Provide the action, applied to the introduction (or the cause which will lead to an effect)
3. This will lead to a result, or effect. The effect is not necessarily a step, rather a simple explanation of what
resulted.

ICE and OAR

Original or Introduction

then:

Action or Cause

leading to:

Result or Effect

Applied to a software example this could be:

1. In the View menu (O/I)
2. Select Reload (A/C)
3. The current screen will reload (R/E)

Simplified Pictures
One of the secrets to meaningful pictures is keeping it simple. The easiest way to do this is to deconstruct
physical objects into simple pieces – rectangles / squares, quads or other polygons, circles / ovals, and cylinders.
Resolution
 DPI dots per inch Output resolution (printer)
 PPI pixels per inch Digital image resolution
 LPI lines per inch “linescreen” or “frequency” – relates to the way printers
reproduce images
 SPI samples per inch Scanner image resolution

Most web graphics are created at 72 PPI

Most print graphics are created at 300 DPI

Image Resolution vs Output Resolution

Output resolution usually needs to be much higher than image resolution, so that text and line art (1-bit images)
are smooth. Without a very high output resolution they would look very jagged. To create smoothness around
the edges of dots, a high output resolution such as 2540 DPI is required.

Linescreen
The printer uses a halftone grid divided into cells. The cells contain the halftone spots. How close together the
cells in the grid are is measured in linescreen, in lines per inch, or LPI. The LPI is dependent on the output
device and the type of paper. The lower the LPI the larger and more obvious the halftone dots are in the printed
image. The higher the LPI, the smaller and and less obvious the dots are in the printed image.

In an 85-line (LPI) screen there are 85 lines of dots in one inch, both horizontally and vertically.

This formula has become the rule (not hard and fast) to determine the correct resolution:

Image resolution equals twice the linescreen

Using a resolution higher than twice the linescreen doesn’t increase the quality of the printed image, but creates
an unnecessarily large file and can slow down printing. If you plan to print an image in a magazine that uses a
linescreen of 150 LPI, you don’t need more than 300 PPI. Because so many print jobs are output at 150 LPI, 300
PPI has become the “standard” for resolution.

Raster or Bitmapped Images

Raster or bitmap refers to images, monitor displays, and computer graphics that use dots (on paper), or pixels
(on the monitor). The term bitmap comes about because the tiny dots, or bits of information, are laid out map-
like, from left to right in rows.
Raster images are manipulated with photo-editing software, which works with pixels (e.g. Photoshop, Paintshop
Pro, paint.net)

The higher the resolution, the higher the quality of the image, and the more likely you are to maintain that
quality if the image is resized.

Raster / Bitmap File Types

 JPEG/JPG
 GIF
 TIFF/TIF
 BMP (Windows Bitmap)
 PNG (Portable Network Graphic)
 Photoshop PSD
 EPS (pixel)

The JPEG/JPG format has become popular due to increased use of the internet, digital cameras, and so on. But
graphic designers and print professionals prefer TIFF files; TIFFs are a true, lossless, 24-bit colour format
intended for cross-platform use.

ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
 Can show smooth graduations of colour  Can look jagged or blocky
 Good for photos and variations in tone  Easily distorted through resizing
 Resolution can be an issue, esp. with resizing
 File sizes can be large

Resolution for 1-bit raster images

The resolution for greyscale and colour images is found by looking at the linescreen. But 1-bit artwork (line-
art) doesn’t have any screens. Each pixel of a 1-bit image becomes one dot in the printed image on the page.
This means that a 1-bit artwork requires a higher resolution than greyscale or colour artwork. For most office
printers that means the image should be the same resolution as the output device. For a 1200-DPI laser printer,
scan your art at the same setting.

Changing Resolution
As soon as you change the dimensions of a raster image, you change its resolution. When the file was created, it
had a set number of pixels. If you later increase the physical dimensions of the file, the pixels have to stretch.

You can add more pixels as you scale an image, instead of stretching them. In Photoshop this is called
resampling. Resampling doesn’t work as well as getting the right resolution to begin with, and can leave your
images a bit soft or blurry.

If you can, rescan the image at a larger resolution. If it’s a digital photo, re-take the photo if possible. Otherwise
try resampling, followed by sharpening (Unsharp Mask in Photoshop).
Vector Images
Made using mathematical formulae that describe the elements in the image using points and the paths
connecting those points. Images are manipulated with a drawing program, such as Adobe Illustrator, Freehand,
and CorelDraw.

Vector File Types

 Macromedia Freehand (.fh)
 Corel Draw (.cdr)
 Adobe Illustrator (.ai)
 SVG
 EPS (vector)—Encapsulated PostScript
 ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
 Often have smaller file sizes  Special software required to work with them
 Great for line and drawing based images  Not so good for variations in tone, e.g. photos
 Can be resized & manipulated without  Steep learning curve to create & manipulate vector
distortion or loss of image quality graphics
 The detail can be sharper  Realistic graphics very laborious to create
 They are resolution independent

Ideal for logos, maps, and other smooth-edged images that will be used at different sizes depending on the
publications they’re placed into.

Vector graphics are very easily modified.

Native Vector Files

Most page-layout and other applications don’t accept the native file format for CorelDraw or other vector
illustration programs, except Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) can be placed in many layout programs such as
InDesign, QuarkXPress, and more basic programs such as Microsoft Publisher and Apple Pages.

Choosing Which File Format to Use

Which type of image format to use will generally be based on what type of image you are working with and
what software you have available. It will also depend on the intended output for the images. Whenever possible,
use the native file format as the program you’re working in.

Vector images are the best choice for typefaces, charts and graphs, drawings, and other graphics that must have
sharp lines when scaled to various sizes.

Raster images are the best choice for creating subtle gradations of shares and colour, such as photos or in a
computer-generated painting. Just be sure to have a high enough resolution.

JPEG Compression
When you save a file as a JPEG, a certain amount of data is thrown away and you can’t get it back. You can
compress JPEGs quite a bit before you notice it, but you’ll eventually see the degradation. Once you open a
JPEG and start working on it, you really shouldn’t save it as a JPEG again if it’s intended for professional use.
You’re applying more compression to an image that has already been compressed. Save as Photoshop or TIFF
files ideally.

PDF (Portable Document Format)

PDFs embed all the necessary information to view a single document or an entire publication within the file
itself: text, images, page breaks, fonts etc. This way you see the document exactly as it was originally created.
Many print shops ask people to use PDF files when sending finished documents (vs PostScript files in the past).

In general, try to avoid the older, primitive file types:

 GIF
 PICT (Macintosh)
 BMP
 WMF (Windows Metafile)
 DCS

For print, the best advice is to ask your printer.

Week 12: Data Visualization
Data in and of itself isn’t interesting – it’s the meaning we derive from the data that is. Users want meaning, not
just numbers.

People universally understand images before they understand text.

Types of Information Graphics and Their Uses

1. Clutter is a failure of design, not an attribute of information (Edward Tufte)

2. Visual problems should not be fixed by reducing content-resolution
3. Instead, fix the design

Tufte’s Principles of Analytical Design

1. Comparisons
Show comparisons, contrasts, differences

2. Show causality, mechanism, structure, explanation

3. Multivariate Analysis (show more than 1 or 2 variables)

4. Integration of Evidence
Completely integrate words, numbers, images, diagrams.

5. Documentation
Thoroughly document the evidence. Provide a detailed title, indicate the authors & sponsors, document the data
sources, show complete measurement scales, point out relevant issues
6. Content counts most of all
Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of their
content.

Infographics
The word infographic is a portmanteau created by jamming together two words: information that you want to
convey in a graphic form. You might be tempted to think of this in terms of bar graphs and similar
representations of numbers, but that obscures an important distinction:

Bar graphs and their cousins (line graphs, pie charts, etc.) are more properly referred to as data graphics.

…they primarily present numbers, and although well-designed ones also help viewers understand the meaning
of those numbers, they’re still highly abstract and leave interpretation of those numbers to the viewer.

In contrast, an infographic informs—it helps the viewer to translate raw data into meaningful information. The
presence of data is not required.

Infographics offer a powerful advantage over lonely words: we humans are intensely visual, and a story told
visually, in combination with text, is often more compelling than alternative formats. Images have the ability to
invoke emotions in ways that cold, hard words and facts often fail to accomplish. This means that infographics,
even the ones that have cold, hard facts at their core, resemble marketing more closely than they do science, and
depend more on classical techniques of rhetoric (the art of persuasion) than on more abstract appeals to reason.

The design of an effective infographic begins with a careful consideration of the knowledge, idea, or feeling that
you want to convey—in short, on your message.

Effective infographics must utilize a visual “vocabulary” that viewers understand.

In classroom uses of infographics, where viewers expect to be required to exert some effort to learn, it is
probably acceptable to use images whose meaning must be learned. In other contexts, such as the infographics
made famous by USA Today, viewers expect images
to be instantly recognizable, and the more you make them work to decipher an image, the more likely it is that
you’ll fail to communicate; only highly motivated viewers will make the effort. Thus, crafting effective
infographics is no different from other forms of technical
communication: it requires considerable knowledge of your audience.

You may need to learn to overcome the conditioning to emphasize black and white
infographics. Colour is more visually attractive, and in choosing attractive, I remind you that the word is not just
about aesthetics; it is about attracting the viewer’s attention.

When you prepare colour materials (print or digital), remember that some people are colour blind. Red–green
colour-blindness is the most common form, particularly among men, so when you choose these colours to
communicate important distinctions, provide additional clues to help red–green colour-blind viewers distinguish
between the two meanings. For example, choose colours that differ both in hue (red vs. green) and value
(darkness) print a copy on a black and white laser printer to confirm that the distinction is visible. Similarly, use
differences in shape to further support this distinction.

For online or onscreen infographics, consider one or more of the following to enhance effectiveness:
 Provide hover text
 Include Alt tags text that will be displayed if the image cannot be displayed,
 Create links to a spoken narration that describes the image.

Infographics have different narrative (story) or rhetorical (persuasive) characteristics.

Telling a Story
 Numbers (data graphics)
 At least in their traditional forms in scientific journals and business reports, data graphics do not inherently
tell a story. Thus, they are typically accompanied by words (often large numbers of words) that build a
narrative

 Geographical maps and network diagrams

Because these images don’t tell a story themselves, they require accompanying text that leads the reader
through the physical or metaphysical landscape

 Flowcharts or network diagrams

Sequence is also important in these diagrams because their goal is to guide the viewer through a decision
process or through the relationships among the parts of a physical or conceptual network

Persuasion in Effective Infographics

Consider the traditional tools of Aristotle’s rhetoric:

 Logos: an appeal to reason or logic

In this context, consider how to present numerical data or an assembly of facts (and their sources) to
persuade viewers that your argument is credible.

 Pathos: an appeal to emotions

Consider the different emotional impacts of the pet images that I described earlier, and choose images that
persuade by evoking the appropriate emotion.

 Ethos: an appeal based on the character

(Thus, the perceived ethics and trustworthiness of the spokesman)
In such cases, the goal is to use a trusted person or organization as the source of the information to persuade
the viewer that the information can be trusted.

Additional Techniques
 Developing strategies to counter contrary opinions
 Choosing an appropriate style
o A plain style is more appropriate when you’re trying to speak to the masses,
o A more ornate and possibly even more pedantic style may be required when you’re trying to reach
an academic audience.
o Passionate if you’re advocating a cause
o Restrained if you’re trying to only present the facts and let the viewer decide
o Humorous if your goal is to entertain or set the viewer at ease
o Serious if you’re trying to convey the gravity of a problem

Wikipedia provides a nice assortment of online tools and social media sites that can be used to create effective
infographics, including the Visual.ly site for data graphics.

Week 13: Charts & Diagrams

The new graphic designer no longer creates visualizations by choosing a rigid collection of shapes, positions
and colours but rather by choosing the rules needed for data to breathe form into geometric abstractions.
- The Data Visualization Revolution, Scientific American

How to Show Differentiation in Data

 Position
Limited ability to change position of data points on most charts
Infographics – more flexibility

 Size
Manually changing size on chart data is a way to draw attention
Ditto for infographics

 Colour
Powerful technique for drawing attention / highlighting data
Be aware of colour-blindness: up to 10% of people are colour blind.

Colorbrewer website
Lets you use colourblind palettes etc.

www.color-blindness.com
Colourblindness simulator—lets you upload an image and see how colourblind people view

 Contrast
Manually or automatically changing the contrast of data is a great way to highlight

 Shape
May not be the best way to show differentiation in data, but useful if combined with other methods.

The Importance of Scale

The scale drastically affects the visualization and the story that it tells. (Loose) Rules for choosing scale:

1. Am I using a chart type that requires a certain approach to scale?

Generally the answer is no, but there are some chart types that do have specific rules to follow. For example, bar
charts should always start at 0.
The height of the bars means something.

2. Am I comparing things in a self-contained context within the context of the chart?

If you have a chart with no external references, there’s probably no need to put these numbers in the context of
other numbers outside of the data that you’re actually displaying.

3. External reference
Sometimes you might want to set the scale based on an arbitrary number, for example a sales graph where the
scale goes to 20 000 even though the data only goes to 8000: the reason being 20 000 is the sales target for the
year.

4. Am I being fair and unbiased?

Look for bias and eliminate it wherever you can.

Legends and Sources

Beginner’s Mind
Zen Buddhist concept that you should come to everything with an open mind, without any preconceptions.

If you can channel a child’s mind, or a novice’s mind in the area you’re discussing, you can get to a point where
you have great user empathy for people who know nothing about what you’re showing. That will help you
understand what’s hard for them to understand, which will help you figure out what you should include in the
legend.

Notes & Sources

 Where the data comes from
 Notes on the technology
 Provide sources: will allow your users to look at the data themselves: this provides credibility, and allows
interested users to learn more if they are interested.

The Right Paradigm: Basic Charts

When to use which basic chart type:
 Bar charts
 Line charts
 Area charts
 Timelines
 Scatter plots
 Bubble charts
 Pie charts

Bar Charts
 Used incredibly widely, because they’re extremely effective.

 Humans have a built-in capacity to easily parse the differences between these rectangular shapes: we’re
wired to see this type of chart.

 Any time you’re doing data visualization, you should start off by thinking of it as a bar chart, and ask
yourself, is there a reason this should not just be a bar chart?

 Bar charts are really good at showing just a few data points.

Grouped Bar Chart

Grouped bar chart: two data points, represented by grey and black.

When you start adding more data points to standard bar charts, they can start to become hard to read.

Stacked Bar Chart

If you’re trying to make an emphasis on a comparison within groups, if you want to think of the elements of
data as a part of a whole, like a category, then a stacked bar chart might be the way to go.

Above you can see that the whole bar represents the total value for each group, and each segment represents the
category values, or the proportion within the group.

Stacked Percentage Bar

If you want to emphasize not the total value for each, but the relative value, i.e. how much each category
influences the total value, a stacked percentage bar might be a good choice.

Above, each bar represents 100% of each data point. So each segment within it represents the relative value
within the whole as a percentage. It’s often easier to see relationships within a stacked percentage chart e.g. if
you wanted to show the relative strength of a category within the whole.

Line Charts
The bar chart can’t convey all types of data. If you look at the two charts below, both are showing changes in
values over time. The problem is that the bar chart really only shows each value at a single point.

Line charts are a great idea when you’re showing things over time.
 Timelines

Timelines are good for telling content-driven stories with time-based elements.

Area Charts

 An area chart is like a filled in line chart.

 Line charts are often better than filled in line charts, because where the lines cross it can be hard to see
where the filled in area boundaries are.

 For example, the dark grey is covering up the lighter grey and the medium grey behind it. It’s hard to
tell where the relative values are – you can’t tell where the bottoms of the troughs are in the light grey.
But this is an interesting way of looking at data.

Stacked Area Chart

Here you have the filled in line charts again, and they’re treated like stacked bars on top of each other.

Again this is good at showing categories of data over time and how they relate to each other.
Stacked Percentage Area Chart

An effective way of showing the relative strength of categories over time, but as a portion of a whole. So again
the top above is 100%.

Scatter Plot

A good chart type for showing two variables. Scatter plots are great at showing correlation.

Above you can see that as x increases, y also increases (a positive correlation – whereas things go up on one
axis, they go up on the other axis).

A negative correlation scatter plot; as one axis increases, the other decreases.
 The scatter plot above doesn’t have a discernible correlation, but there are some interesting patterns. Certain
types of patterns will show up better in a scatter plot than a bar chart, for instance.

Bubble Chart

 Bubble charts are great at showing three variables.

 It’s really just a scatter plot, but with a third variable: size. The size of the dot is representing that third
variable.

 Above, there is correlation again: as x goes up, so does the size of the dot, generally. But it’s easy to see the
outliers.

Pie Chart

There is an intense debate about how worthless (or not) the pie chart is. There are plenty of detractors of this
form of chart. And a few defenders.
Pie charts have two major problems:
1. It’s really hard to parse when there are more than a couple of data points.
Above we have six different pieces of data. And it’s hard to parse. You can see the smallest slice, and
the biggest, but three of the medium slices, you can’t tell anything about them.

2. Pie charts are bad at showing slight variance between data points.
The two top wedges look almost identical in size. Human eyes have a hard time parsing circular shares
and arcs. Whereas if these were bar charts, you could probably immediately see the difference between
those data points.

Pie charts are actually pretty effective at comparing the difference between two data points, especially if it’s just
across one variable.

The Right Paradigm: Alternative Charts

Box Plots

 Great at showing a lot of data, in a very simple form.

 Not seen in the real world very often, although they are used very frequently in finance, showing stock
market data.

 Very good at showing multiple variables, e.g. open price, close price, average stock price.

 The dotted lines are called whiskers.

 Heatmaps

 Good for showing a lot of data, and a lot of variables at once.

 Very effective way of seeing trends.

 It’s easy to see the correlations and overlaps between different items. Above we’re looking at the time
of the day and the day of the week for web visits on a website. It’s easy to see that in the middle of the
day, during weekdays, this website gets a lot of traffic. Early in the morning, no matter what day of the
week, there’s not a lot of data.

Radar or Spider Charts

 Use with caution.

 Good for showing multiple variables at a time, and showing the relative strengths between items,
especially if they’re transitioning / changing over times.

 Like pie charts, it’s hard for the human eye and brain to parse the absolute values. Where there is too
much data, it’s very hard to tell what’s going on.

 Each one of the spines coming out of the centre represents a single variable.

Parallel Coordinates
 Good for looking at multiple variables.

 Above we’re looking at sepal length, petal length, sepal width, and petal width (botanical terms)

 Where the horizontal lines cross the vertical line, that’s the actual value. While there’s a lot of data
overall, it’s easy to see trends. For example, there’s a decent amount of sepal length amongst the red
category, but much less variety for the red category’s petal length.

 It’s also good for showing relationships between variables, for example you can see there’s some sort
of correlation between the second variable, and the fourth variable, petal length and width, amongst the
red category, but less correlation between sepal length versus sepal width for that category.

 Can be overwhelming when there’s a lot of data. However, when using an interactive version, there’s
functionality called scrubbing.

Scatter Plot Matrix

 Effectively throwing a bunch of scatter plots onto a page.

 Able to look at a bunch of variables, and a bunch of different views of those variables, at the same
time.
The Right Paradigm: Hierarchical Charts
Data visualization is often about focusing on showing the connections between, and the hierarchy of objects.
This unique category requires a different way of thinking about, and displaying this in useful, understandable,
and meaningful ways.

D3 Website
D3 is Data-Driven Documents. It’s a JavaScript library, for doing data visualization. It’s most often used for
interactive graphics, but you can create just about any visualization out of data using this open source library.
There are a lot of examples on this website.

Tree Diagram

 Sort of the default form for doing hierarchical data.

 Very easy, understandable, simple way to think about displaying hierarchical data.

 Sort of like the bar chart for hierarchical data.

 You can use interactivity to bring it to life, e.g. clicking on nodes to collapse / expand them.

 Uses Nodes and links.

 Node Link Diagram

Another form to show more complex data, where there’s a lot of connections in between objects, including
connections from one object across nodes to other objects.

Like a tree, these have objects (nodes), and links, which are lines connecting the nodes. Very easy and simple to
understand. But like other hierarchical data forms, you can get into trouble quickly. But again, interactivity can
help solve those problems.

Adjacency Matrix

 Good for showing both the forest, and the trees, in terms of how to look at the data (both details as well as
big picture view).
 2D display of many, many data points. Each column is one variable, and each row is the same variable.
Above is a display of cast members in Les Miserables and when they were on stage at the same time. So
child2 (top line) was only on stage with two others.

 Sorting plays a big roles in how you see data using this form.

 Very interesting way of revealing patterns that you might not see using other data forms.

Tree Map

Not about the connections between items; this is about the hierarchy of the items only.

Very inductive to interactivity: you can click to zoom in and see more details, iteratively.

Chord Diagram

A circular display; along the outside of the display is each variable.

 Venn Diagram

The Venn diagram is sort of like a bar chart, a norm, extremely common.

Great at showing where things overlap, but necessarily the specific data, how much the overlap is.
Week 14: Producing Professional Documents
GDID 705: PRINCIPLES OF USER EXPERIENCE
The general aim of this course:

To provide students with the practical knowledge and

application of usability testing.
APPENDIX 1: INFORMATION DESIGN
WEBSITES
Professional Industry Bodies
TechComm NZ
http://www.tcanz.org.nz/

Technical Communication Body of Knowledge (TCBoK) – NZ & Aus

http://tcbok.info/

IEEE Professional Communication Society

http://pcs.ieee.org/

Institute for Scientific and Technical Communication (UK)

http://www.istc.org.uk/

Institute of IT Professionals (NZ)

http://iitp.nz/

Tech Comms Software Vendor Websites

Adobe
http://www.adobe.com/education/educators/learn.edu.html?

Adobe InDesign
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/topics-cs6.html

Microsoft
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/training-FX101782702.aspx

Writing Sites & Blogs

I’d rather be Writing
http://idratherbewriting.com/

About.com: freelance writing

http://freelancewrite.about.com/

DocDownload
https://www.docdownload.com.au/

Technical Writing World

http://technicalwritingworld.com/

TechWhirl
http://www.techwr-l.com/
User Friendly Manuals
http://www.prc.dk/user-friendly-manuals/ufm/home.html

Write
http://www.write.co.nz/

Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org.nz/licences/licences-explained/

Communication
Busting the Mehrabian Myth
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7dboA8cag1M

Information / Content Management

Step Two Designs
www.steptwo.com.au

AIIM
http://aiim.org/

AIIM Glossary
http://www.aiim.org/What-is-ECM-Enterprise-Content-Management

Archives NZ
http://archives.govt.nz/

http://archives.govt.nz/advice/public-offices/digital-recordkeeping/digital-recordkeeping-standard-mapping-
database-procedur

DITA XML
http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html

Top Ten Mistakes When Selecting a CMS

http://www.idealware.org/articles/top-ten-mistakes-when-selecting- cms

7 Rules for Selecting the right CMS

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/7-rules-for-selecting-the-right-content-management-system-
023026.php?pageNum=3

Center for Information Development Management (CIDM) – JoAnn Hackos’ Site

http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/
Information Management Journal
http://content.arma.org/IMM/online/InformationManagement.aspx

The Content Wrangler

http://thecontentwrangler.com/
The Language of Content Strategy
http://www.thelanguageofcontentstrategy.com/

Usability Net (task analysis)

http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/taskanalysis.htm

Sharon Burton
http://www.sharonburton.com/

Visual Design
A List Apart
http://alistapart.com/

Matt Brett: Web Designer

https://mattbrett.com/

McSweeney’s
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/

Adobe Kuhler Colour Wheel

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

Figure.nz
http://figure.nz/

Typography
Identifont (helps identify fonts)
http://www.identifont.com/

Typographica. A journal of typography and type news

http://typographica.org/

Typography matters (article)

http://alistapart.com/article/typography

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

http://webtypography.net/

I Love Typography
http://ilovetypography.com/

Typedia (‘a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia’)

http://typedia.com/
Lynda.com
http://www.lynda.com

Butterick’s Practical Typography (Free eBook on typography basics)

http://practicaltypography.com/

Best Practices of Combining Typeface

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/best-practices-of-combining-typefaces/

Typewolf’s Resource Page

https://www.typewolf.com/resources

Free Font Sites

Dafont
http://www.dafont.com/

Font Squirrel
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

1001 Free Fonts

http://www.1001freefonts.com/

Free Typography
http://freetypography.com/

Google Fonts
https://www.google.com/fonts

Usability
Usability Body of Knowledge Glossary
http://www.usabilitybok.org/glossary

Usability Professionals Association (UXPA) website

https://uxpa.org/

STC Special Interest Group – Usability

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/bookshelf/

Nielsen Norman Group (Jakob Nielsen's website)

https://www.nngroup.com

UX Matters website (online web magazine)

http://www.uxmatters.com/index.php

Smashing Magazine website (for web designers)

https://www.smashingmagazine.com
Sensible (Steve Krug's website)
http://www.sensible.com

UX Magazine website
http://uxmag.com

Journal of Usability Studies Online

https://uxpa.org/publication/journal

User Interface Engineering

https://www.uie.com/

Other Resources
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_usablevsuseful

http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/25-reasons-why-saving-time-on-your-intranet-is-a-bad-
metric/#comments
APPENDIX 2: MISCELLANEOUS

Full Block Letter Layout Example

Brendan Quinn 1. Letterhead / writer’s name and address

23 Hepburn Street
Freeman’s Bay
Auckland

03 August 2001 2. Date

Mr John Doe 3. Inside address

10 Gulag Street
Level 5
Somewhere

Dear John, 4. Salutation

Here is the body of the letter. 5. Body

I hope you find
it satisfactory

Yours Sincerely, 6. Complimentary close

Brendan Quinn 7. Writer’s signature and designation

Technical Consultant
ALTAIR SYSTEMS
MICROSOFT WORD STYLE SET EXAMPLE

HEADING 1 CHAPTER
Century Gothic 18, FULL CAPS, bold , single line spacing, 16pt after

HEADING 2 Major Section

Century Gothic 16, lower case, bold , single line spacing, 14pt after

Heading 3 Minor Section

Century Gothic 14, lower case, bold , single line spacing, 12 pt after

Heading 4 Low Level heading

Century Gothic 12, lower case, bold , single line spacing, 8 pt after

Heading 5 List Item

Century Gothic 11, lower case, bold , single line spacing, 6 pt after

Normal Paragraph text

Century Gothic, 10, lower case, 95% black, single line spacing, 0 point after
APPENDIX 3: COMMONLY MISUSED
WORDS

outcome / output
outcome an outcome is a high-level 'reason for being' (something that you don't necessarily
control but your activities support or impact on).

output an output is simply an activity that you undertake. The outputs of a fish and chip
shop are deepfried fish and chips. But its outcomes may be something like 'feeding
local communities' or if you want to look at it from another perspective 'making local
communities obese'!

farther / further
farther physical distance (farther)
further figurative distance or amount

lay / lie
lay to place / set down (lay / laid)
lie to recline (lie, lay, lain)

comprise / compose
comprise to be made up of (our survival kit comprises)
compose form the substance of something; the parts make up the whole
(a nuclear family is composed of a mother, father, and children)

proscribe / prescribe
proscribe to prohibit
prescribe to dictate a course of action

who / whom
who rephrase with I, we, he, she, it, they – if it works then use who
whom rephrase with me, us, him, her, them

which vs that
Determining whether a dependent clause is restrictive or non-restrictive is at the heart of the which vs. that
debate.

Traditionally:
If a clause is restrictive, you should use that.
If a clause is non-restrictive, you should use which.