Why does information fail?

Despite the investment of time and money, many documents fail to meet their readers' needs. A 1991 report* summarised the problems, which are still relevant today:

• missing information
• poor writing, and ambiguity
• failure to anticipate the readers' problems, questions, and environment
• written for the like of the writers and their environment, not the readers and theirs
• wrong technical level
• poor formatting and design of structure
• poor indexing — good information but hard to find
• professional appearance belies content
• documents not updated to match product
• documents produced without planned terms of reference

Why do these problems occur frequently? Because there's a belief that anyone can create effective documents. However, it's likely that this work is the most complex work that is ever done regularly by people without any appropriate training.

* Quality and Professionalism in Documentation, 1991, Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, www.istc.org.uk.

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Creating successful information

To create successful documents, authors need a wide range of skills. In broad terms, they need to be able to obtain information, understand information, and present information.

Readers want documents that contain the right information and are easy to use and easy to understand. This section looks at how professional authors meet these requirements.

Selecting the right information

This depends on:

• research. Authors gather information in various ways: interviewing experts and readers, reading reference documents, and examining products.
• defining the audience. When planning documents, it's important to take into account the readers' work and their requirements — the documents will then contain information that is both relevant and at the right technical level. This means authors need to understand their audience: what they do, what they already know, and what they need to know.
• defining the document set. Is just one document needed? Or does the material need to be split into several documents? Whatever the answer, it's essential to establish exactly what information a document should contain and what should be excluded.

By analysing a document's audience and purpose, authors create a specification for writing the document.

Making information easy to use

This depends on:

• navigation aids. To enable readers to find selected topics quickly, authors include navigation aids such as indexes, links, and searches.
• document structure. For readers who want to read a document or a chapter from start to finish, authors must present the information in the appropriate sequence. Success depends on creating outlines (lists of headings) for the document; for example, an outline that shows the chapter headings, and an outline for an individual chapter. It's a vital task but not easy — the required outlines usually emerge slowly during research. Once established, they provide another part of the specification for writing the document. Selecting the words used in headings needs great care: the words must be familiar and helpful to readers.
• readability. It's hard work for anyone to read, understand and memorise material that is new and possibly complex. Therefore, it's essential that this workload isn't increased by a struggle to read the information from the page or screen. To avoid this, authors pay careful attention to page design, typography, and writing style — for more on these topics, see Website design.

Making information easy to understand

This depends on:

• terminology. Terms must be used consistently: a term should have only one meaning, and a meaning should be represented by only one term.
• exposition. Once all the topics already mentioned have been sorted out, authors can write the text. The writing part of a project is arguably the easy bit, provided the authors have a thorough understanding of how the human mind processes new information.
• diagrams and illustrations. Diagrams and illustrations can convey some types of information more effectively than text. Often, the best solution is to use text and graphics together, taking care to ensure that the graphics are fully integrated with the related text.
  For more, see Diagrams.

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Delivery formats

What's the best way to present information? On paper or on screen? There's no simple answer but it's important to make the right choice. In fact the answer is often 'both' and that's why some organisations are now using single-source publishing.

The fundamental principle of single-source publishing is to store a document's content separate from its presentation instructions. This makes it easy to publish the document in different formats. The key features of single-source publishing are:

• there is only one version of a document's content (the single source)
• the content is simply plain text plus the document's structure
• there is a set of presentation instructions (layout, typography) for each delivery format (for example, print, HTML, or PDF)
• the content is combined with a set of presentation instructions to produce a document

This approach means that, for example, the same content can be presented in printed form, in a PDF file for Adobe Acrobat, and in HTML for web browsers.

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