Form and Document Creation is one of the things that technical communicators do as part of creating deliverables for their companies or clients. Document design is: "the field of theory and practice aimed at creating comprehensible, persuasive and usable functional documents".Jansen These forms and documents can have many different purposes such as collecting or providing information.
Visualization and Visual Communication
Significance
Eva Brumberger, an instructor in the professional writing program at Virginia Tech, surveyed professional writers about the nature of their work in order to evaluate what student writers are taught before entering the work force.Brumberger, 369, 392. These professional writers confirmed that their role has developed past the verbal communication dominant in the literature presented to students and has developed into mostly visual communication.Brumberger, 386
Definition
Technical communicators must take data and convert it into information; this process is known as visualization, or visual communication.Blythe, 347. Because of the widespread use of digital media, modern technical communicators must also now think about visualization as it relates to digital forms and documents. Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, editors of the book Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, define visualization as the: "use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition". Though many forms and documents will still have a paper copy for distribution, most forms and documents are now utilized online in some fashion; this is why there is such focus on the computer-supported representations for maximal cognition. Brumberger defines visual communication as: "designing print, Web, and multimedia documents…creating visual displays of information/data, generating other visual material…and any other communication tasks which rely on visual language".Brumberger, 373.
Examples
There are many areas where professional writers utilize visualization. It is most useful in the following areas: complex documents, statistical and categorical data, personal services, and histories.Blythe, 348.
Visual communication responsibilities include: designing visual content, determining when to use visual material, modifying existing material, and applying templates that already exist to material.Brumberger, 387.
Visual communication tasks include designing: presentations, print documents, page layouts, s, and data displays.
Human-Centered Design
Human-centered design focuses on ensuring that the audience will comprehend the information being presented. It is: "how a frustrated and confused subject...comprehends a critical message in a crowded and noisy environment".Blythe, 349. The goal of human-centered design is "to make information accessible" and "to give form to data".Blythe, 350.
Luke Wroblewski, senior director of Project Ideation and Design at Yahoo! Inc., and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, also has some human-centered design ideas for web forms and documents.Wroblewski, 18. He says: "because people want what’s on the other side of a web form, their general tendency is to jump right in, start answering questions and hope to get it done quickly". As a result, he recommends designing a clear path to completion for the form or document. He also mentions messaging without proper priority, like hard-to-find error messages, and unconnected primary actions that can similarly cloud the steps people need to take in order to get through a form. For a web form to have human-centered design, information must be structured "in a logical pattern from start to finish".Wroblewski, 19.
The Structure and Organization
When a technical communicator is creating a form or document, it is vital that they pay close attention to structure and organization as these are the means that allow visualization to work.
Functional Analysis
In order to design a form or document, the writer should understand and evaluate the different constraints in the rhetorical situation; this is called functional analysis.Lentz & Maat, 387. One of the biggest components in analyzing a form or document is to determine the communicative purpose of the form or document. Leo Lentz and Henk Pander Maat, at the University of Utrecht, break down communicative purpose into four elements:Lentz & Maat, 388. intended communicative effect: the intended effect should fall into one of three categories; "a cognitive change in the mental state of the reader, who learns something or forms a particular attitude, a change in the reader's behavior, such as handling a machine or buying a product, or a change in the social reality as a result of the collective behavior of readers, such as the sale of a product". topic: this is based on the reader's needs, since the reader is the one expected to act on the information.Lentz & Maat, 389. target group: this should be a specific group described either by demographic variables or communicative predispositions.Lentz & Maat, 390. organizational goal: this is the change that should occur in every individual reader.Lentz & Maat, 391.
After analyzing the communicative purpose, the technical communicator can design a form or document that will match the requirements and meet expectations for it.Lentz & Maat, 397.
Explicit Structure
One aspect of form and document creation that technical communicators should pay close attention to is explicit structure. When the structure is explicit, the reader can interact with the form or document on a more effective level.Farkas, 9. The technical communicator’s "primary means to make structure explicit is through headings and links". The technical communicator must add these headings when they are drafting the form or document, because the structure will remain implicit until they are added.Farkas, 10
The authors of Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Love & Typography add hierarchy to the idea of making structure explicit. They say: "effective hierarchy gets people to look where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. Without it the reader is left confused and frustrated. Emphasis can be stressed by size, weight, color, style, and placement"."Meet Your Type", 26. Thus, emphasis from several different font decisions joins headings as a feature that makes structure explicit.
Abstract Structure
Another aspect to consider when designing a form or document is abstract structure. This is the idea that text has a graphical component.Power et al., 211. Text incorporates a graphical component not only because the words are: "often accompanied by conventional graphics such as pictures or diagrams, but they themselves form graphical elements such as titles, headings, chapters, sections, captions, paragraphs, and bulleted lists".
When considering abstract structure in planning a form or document, a technical communicator must also look at what Richard Power, Nadjet Bouayad-Agha, and Donia Scott call document structure: "the organization of a document into graphical constituents like sections, paragraphs, sentences, bulleted lists, and figures".Power et al., 213. This document structure also goes hand-in-hand with the human-centered design aspect of visualization as pertaining to form and document creation. Technical communicators should look at their form or document to make sure that the abstract structure of the form or document is helping achieve the overall goal with the reader.
Though it focuses on a visual and graphic effect, abstract structure also focuses on wording.Power et al., 216. The examples that follow are taken verbatim from Power, Bouayad-Agha, and Scott. They show a progression from a passage written by a technical communication novice (a), to an edit by a more experienced technical communicator (b), to an edit by a senior expert technical communicator (c). The successive changes are designed to make the structure and wording valid.
(a) Elixir is a white cream. It is used in the treatment of cold sores. It contains aliprosan. This is effective against a range of viral skin disorders. It should be used only on your lips and face.
(b) Elixir is a white cream.
It is used in the treatment of cold sores.
It contains aliprosan. This is effective against a range of viral skin disorders.
It should be used ONLY on your lips and face.
(c) Elixir is a white cream. It is used in the treatment of cold sores. It contains aliprosan. This is effective against a range of viral skin disorders. N.B. Elixir should be used only on your lips and face.
Visual Organization
Other considerations the technical communicator keeps in mind when creating a form or document include: number of pages, flush, capital letters, and bullets.
Number of Pages
If at all possible, using one page for the document or form is best because the reader can: "glance at the information without flipping pages or having to search for related sections, both results of poor planning that can distract and confuse the reader".Harvey, 20.
Flush
When typing a document, the technical communicator should make the text flush left because: "it’s the easiest to read because we read it most often"."Meet Your Type," 29. Keeping the text flush left instead of justifying it: "[gives] the text a more harmonious appearance and makes it easier to read, since all wordspaces have the same width"."Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips", 6. The reason justified text should be avoided is because of the: "hideously [stretched] and [squished] words and spaces".
Capital Letters
Capital letters should not be used to accentuate words on a form or document; it is too distracting and disrupts the look of the form or document."Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips", 1. When capital letters are absolutely necessary, say in the case of an acronym or abbreviation, small caps should be used, with or without initial caps. When capital letters are not absolutely necessary, the technical communicator should evaluate the effectiveness of italicizing the word or phrase for emphasis.
Bullets
Some technical communicators use hyphens for listed items; however, a writer should use bullets or centered points instead."Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips", 7.
Standard Expository Model
In analyzing structure and organization for a form or document, it is beneficial for a technical communicator to determine if the form or document being created fits within a group of documents called the standard expository model (SE model). If the form or document being created is an SOE, then there are special strategies to writing the form or document.
Standard expository models are: "nonfiction print documents that (1) are primarily informational rather than expressive; (2) are intended to be read linearly (broadly speaking, from beginning to end); and (3) reveal structure explicitly with at least one heading level but very often more."Farkas, 12.
If a form being created fits within the SE model, there are three main strategies to be employed when creating it.
The first is to tuck introductions and conclusions.Farkas, 13. This means that there is no separate heading for the introduction and conclusion; instead, the introduction and conclusion aspects of the writing are within the first and last main points.Farkas, 13-14. The second strategy is to subdivide and indent subpoints within a section to account for brief subsections.Farkas, 14. The final strategy is to use stacked headings by adding subheadings underneath main headings, much like in this Wikipedia article itself.
Language and Word Choice
Gillian Harvey, a partner and senior designer at Plumbheavy Design Inc., a company that does graphic design and information design, has several recommendations for technical communicators regarding language and word choice.Harvey, 24.