Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
June/July 2005
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter June/July 2005 |
The July meeting is on Wednesday, July 20, 2005, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
In this talk, Peter Schorer, author of How to Create Zero-Search-Time Computer Documentation, will outline the ZST method for producing documentation. ZST documentation allows users to find the information they want in less than 25 seconds at least 80% of the time. The method is technology independent, and thus can be applied to the creation of online and/or paper documentation.
Even at this late date, the fields of documentation (and human factors (computer-human interface [CHI] design) do not have a simple metric for the effectiveness of their products. And yet measurement of results is a central requirement of any technical field.
Schorer believes that the simple metric is "look-up-time": the speed with which users of the product can find how how to do what they want to do. As he has written: "Strange though it may seem, everything falls into its proper place once we make look-up-time the central criterion of success: the organization of indexes and of instructional text, the order in which the work of documentation is to be done, what should be covered, the relative importance of writing style -- all fall into place when look-up-time is the central concern."
Peter Schorer has had a long career in both documentation and computer programming. He was a manager of technical publications departments at Beckman Instruments in Palo, and at Signetics in Sunnyvale, for ten years. His department at Beckman regularly won prizes at annual STC competitions. He then joined Hewlett-Packard, where he worked in both programming and documentation. He was project leader for an early online Help system. For over 20 years he was a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto. He holds a B.A. in English from Lehigh University and an M.S. in Computer Science from San Jose State University.
Copyright © 2005 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication under the provisions of the chapter's copyright policy.