Chapter 11 - Designing Information

The goal of this chapter was to describe principles that affect accessibility, comprehensibility, and usability of your documents when technical information is presented.

There are two major designs to be concerned about when you present information to your audience.

1. Information Design - This is concerned with the way you organize your information to increase audience comprehension.
2. Document Design - This is a part of information design and consists of five main elements in technical writings.

There are five main elements in technical writings:

1. Textual Elements - letters, numbers, and symbols.
2. Spatial Elements - the spaces between the elements as well as the placement of textual and graphic elements.
3. Graphic Elements - punctuation marks, typographic devices, geometric forms, and visual diagrams.
4. Color and Textural Elements - the hue, saturation, brightness, texture, etc.
5. Dynamic Elements - the motion that is implied in a print document. Often actual motion in an electronic document that uses various kinds of animation.

When applying these elements, it is important to remember that people typically do not like to read extended reports. It is best to make the document as little as possible.

There are three major things that can be done to enhance these technical and electronic documents:
1. Chunking and labeling information by effective use of white space and headings.

2. Arranging information by appropriate integration of visual and verbal chunks.

3. Emphasizing information by effective use of typographic devices and typefaces.

Chunking and Labeling Information

Information can be grouped in chunks using two factors
1. Logical topical relationships
2. Audience needs for the information

A very good example of information grouping or chunking based on topical relationships is table of contents we see everyday in websites and books.

• Different ways to chunk information into groups are by using white space, margins, alignnment and leading and line length. White spaces (on paper or electronically) may be used based on the needs of the document, but they are usually used for margins, between lines within a paragraph, between paragraphs and sections of a document, and around visuals.
• Similarly, carefully choosing margins is equally important, to make the document readable and attractive, i.e. not making the margins too wide or too narrow.
• Another important factor that makes a document accesible and legible is alignment. Proper alignment and justification (right, left, full etc) give a document neta and clean appearance. Also, though it seems like fully justified text would be a better way to justify documents, research shows that managers and nonmanagers prefer dcouments with ragged-right margins because the spacing between each words are even.
• Another way of chunking information is the use of spacing between lines. Generally, text that has line spacing that is one and a half times the letter height is considered easiest to read. Also the lenght of the line and the font type and size really determine the readability of the text as well.

Headings to Label Chunked Information

These are useful for grouping specific portions of information into a bundle that is easily identifiable by the reader. Therefore, if he would wish to find something, he can easily find what he is looking for.

Using Design Conventions

There are two main practices that will help produce more effective documents:

1. Selection of Appropriate Grids.
2. Placement of Visuals Near Related Text

This is useful for being able to show how various things apply in a specific text. For example, putting a specific picture relating to some texts right by the text is much more efficient than placing it in an appendix.

Avoiding Problems in Arranging Information

There are four potential problems that distract readers:

1. Chartjunk (miscellaneous graphic junk that does nothing to help people understand the information)
2. Tombstoning (involves aligning headings so that readers mistakenly chunk the text when they look at the page)
3. Heading Placement (comes from leaving too few lines after a heading or a subheading at the top or bottom of a column or page)
4. Widows and Orphans (Widows are leftover words and Orphans are when a column or page break occurs in a paragraph after the first line of the paragraph)

Emphasizing Information.
After chunking, labelling and arranging information you may still need to emphasize selected portions of the text to make more important information more accessible and comprehensible. And even though, in today's electronic document's day and age, readers may override a designer's choice to formatting a document, one should still consider typeface and typographic devices important tools to emphasize certain texts for both print and Web pages.

Typefaces

Typefaces or fonts are very important in determining the user's attitude and reaction to a document and so they must be chosen wisely depending upon the intended audiences.

• There are different types of fonts. The most common differentiation in type faces are the serif types and sans serif types. The serif fonts have tiny fine lines usually at the top or bottom of letters, while sans serif types are plain fonts without such lines. Both type of font faces have various uses. For example, sans serif type faces are usually used for short documents, documents for children, the elderly people and people with visual impairments or disabilities because they are simpler and the letters don't have as many distinguishing features. Similarly, long documents like technical reports and journals that are to be read by all readers, usually use serif typefaces so that readers don't tire too quickly. A document with different types of contents can use different kinds of fonts for differentiating such different contents. For example in a manual, commands, instructions, names of components etc are differentiated by using differentiated font faces.
• Choosing the correct type size or font size is also very critical in creating documents. Very small font sizes could result in readability issues, while very large font sizes could offend adults, because big font sizes are usually associated with children's books. The font size should be chosen appropriately depending upon the type of document (eg. business documents, powerpoint presentation etc), intended audience (eg. children, home users, business partnerts etc), attention desired (eg. warnings, special messages etc). Also font size should be chosen based on font face because, the same font size of different font faces could be different in actual sizes. Also, one should be careful when choosing font for web pages, as the same font face and size look different on Windows based computers compared to Macintosh computers.
• The style of font or type you use can also influence the audience. Using ALL CAPS can be effective when it is used to emphasize certain headings, warnings etc, but typing a long sentence in ALL CAPS generally reduces the speed the user can read it and thus he or she may lose interest. A general guideline to writing a document is to use no more than two typefaces and a total of four variations of typeface, type size, or style on a single page or screen, unless otherwise required, for example in a manual.

Typographic Devices

Numbered Lists are common elements in sets of instructions and are also used in reports and proposals

The reasons they are so important are:

1. Sequence or chronology of items
2. Priority of items
3. Total count of items

Using italics, underlining, color and boxes also has three important uses as well

1. Identify Text Hierarchy – Will help the readers locate the main sections in a text
2. Chunk Information – Can effectively chunk related information for readers
3. Emphasize Key Points – Can also be used to highlight terms and points within the text.