101 Standards for Online Communication

JoAnn T. Hackos and Dawn M. Stevens' Standards for Online Communication is really just a list of standards in online communication. There are justifications for these standards, which is what gives the book it's impressive girth, but it's still just a list all the same. While I didn't necessarily disagree with the standards themselves, the rebel in me wanted to throw them all out on principle. For a simple summary of the book check out 101 Standards of Communication by Dawn M. Stevens.

Much like other books on technical communication they suggest a lot of research at the beginning of the project. Get to know your users, set up user profiles, create hierarchies of information, etc. I can see why it's necessary for someone who has become to buried in a project to think rationally to conduct these steps. For instance, a code monkey working at Microsoft would probably have a hard time translating system processes for the technically illiterate; however, I would think an experienced, talented technical writer brought onto a project would be able to anticipate people's reactions without spending too much time researching, mostly because he/she would have done this enough times to know how people think. And to prove this point, let's look at the list Hackos and Stevens' compiled. They start with the research component and then proceed to include the following in the design section of their list:

1. Select readable on-screen fonts
2. Avoid too many font changes
3. Keep line lengths short
4. Distinguish important elements from normal text
5. Avoid excessive emphasis techniques
6. Be consistent screens in the format and design of display
7. Use negative space
8. Avoid horizontal scrolling
9. Make the interface easy to remember
10. Use color sparingly
11. Consider limitations of the hardware and your users

So, the question is how do they know these particular design elements would be distracting to a user unless user reactions could be anticipated without necessarily conducting the research ahead of time? Or is it because they conducted the research that they know this? Personally, I think that the research element is largely exaggerated, and the testing after the online text/site/whatever has been created is far more likely to produce favorable results than spending so much time at the beginning of the project planning and plotting, just because I think that user reactions can be anticipated fairly easily with just a little imaginative empathy for other people on the part of the writer/designer.