#22925
Review: Commentary on: "Little Machines: Understanding Users Understanding Interfaces" 
Online materials, as Johnson-Eilola points out, too often provide speed but neither learning nor conceptual information. Minimum information is often provided in help systems because there are no resources to provide more. But the result is often a system that, without any conceptual information, provides little more than help that is so obvious that it ceases to be helpful. Even when resources are constrained, help systems should, at a minimum, refer to external sources that can help users with important concepts behind the tasks they are trying to perform.
Haramundanis, Kathy. Journal of Computer Documentation (2002). Articles>Reviews>Documentation
#13945
Learnability in Information Design
Design of information used for technical communication of complex products should consider how learnable that information is, and strive to deliver materials that are inherently learnable.The speed of information interchange and the demands of the workplace and school curricula require increasingly minimalist approaches to the material that is made available. People are frustrated by long learning times, and new users of software tools demand rapid absorption of tool capabilities. In addition, many readers of technical information are people for whom English is not their native language.Methods and practices that worked in the period when people were willing to commit to hours of study to understand a topic, or days of practice to master a tool, no longer work in a world based on ?internet time.? To assist our understanding of these trends in learning, this paper addresses three key areas related to learnability: proposing a definition of learnability, showing where learnability and usability intersect, and providing a basis for learnability based on some attributes of human beings.
Haramundanis, Kathy. ACM SIGDOC (2001). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability>Cognitive Psychology
#22908
In the few short years that I have been connected with SIGDOC, the world of the technical communicator has changed quite a bit. These changes are visible in several major areas: in the work itself, in the technology and tools that the communicator uses, in the technologies about which they create information, in the work environment, and in the culture in which they operate.
Haramundanis, Kathy. Journal of Computer Documentation (2001). Articles>Documentation>History
