Daily Archives: June 7, 2011

If a company delivers a lengthy article on-line, why don’t they anticipate that it is going to be read, at least initially, on a computer screen? I have just endured the frustration of trying to read another document formatted in a magazine layout and delivered as an Acrobat document. It is formatted in two columns on a page that when printed out would be on a an 8.5×11 page.

This means that you have to move down the page continuously until you reach the bottom of the column and then scroll back up to the top to the second column before continuing to the next page. There’s no way that you are going to speed read your way through this article. All because you MIGHT print this out. What a waste of time!

The page size should be half size so that you can view its entirety in one screen and you can go page by page with the page down key.

The distributor of the document (in this case ZDNet) could provide value to their customers by surveying the readers as to whether they plan to print the document out or read it on line.

The information surrounding a new software or equipment design follows a predictable cycle. First there is the information gathering cycle, when the developer seeks, collects and organizes the information. During this time, equipment or software designers are preoccupied, information is changing and device or software use is more or less theoretical. Everyone is supposed to be doing thorough task and user analysis but the map always ends up not being the territory.

In the second phase, the information is delivered, hopefully, in some type of interactive environment–for example a classroom. Questions and feedback will send the instructor/developer back for more information and cause on-the-fly revisions. (This is where the instructor learns the meaning of iterative.) If the Gods are smiling, the bulk of the people come to the training or read the manuals as expected and make-up classes catch more.

In the next phase, the forgotten one, the training avoiders/absentees and new hires have to use the device/software along with everyone else. Typically training is not offered or is only offered infrequently. Also, training material is not revised to match revisions in the device/software. Manuals are lost or become victims of the copies of copies phenomenon. Learning becomes more informal and peer-to-peer.

Also, during this phase, especially with software, people develop new and novel practices. Because of this, some are more productive than others and some develop rogue behavior.

Wikis and other web tools could greatly improve the efficiency of the first phase, shore up the informal learning that will inevitably occur in the third and promote the spread of productive techniques that super users will develop.