Quality technical information: paving the way for usable print and web interface design

ABSTRACT

Principles of information style and design have been around for years. Look at the shelf life of Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, published in 1959 and still a bestseller. Producing Quality Technical Information is a gem of a book, whose precise, bullet-style list of seven requirements and a checklist is now even more insightful in the fast-paced world of online information and the World-Wide Web. As a writer, I'm amazed how the IBM authors crystallized the essence of good information design in less than 100 pages. This commentary describes how the book's seven qualities and thirty individual requirements can easily and usefully be extrapolated to address key issues of interface design and usability for today's professional designers and developers.

REFERENCES

• 1: Hugh Beyer , Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1998
• 2: Gretchen Hargis , Michelle Carey , Ann Kilty Hernandez , Polly Hughes , Deirdre Longo , Shannon Rouiller , Elizabeth Wilde, Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors (2nd Edition), Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2004
• 3: IBM Corporation (1992). Object-Oriented Interface Design: IBM Common User Access Guidelines. New York: Que.
• 4: IBM Corporation (1983). Producing Quality Technical Information. Santa Teresa, CA.
• 5: Theo Mandel, The elements of user interface design, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1997

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.5 Document Capture

Keywords:
design, interface, quality, technical information, usability, user, web