Sunday
Jan182009
The Joy of Text
Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 11:59AM
This is a long overdue reply to Michael Hughes' excellent rebuttal titled Will Write for Metamucil, in which he commented on my previous post commenting on his original post. In no was I attacking Michael or the excellent work he's obviously been doing. But I felt strongly about his particular post, and I hope to explain.
Now, I love text, language, the written word. I use chat as the communication channel for how I make a living. I can read fast, and my comprehension when reading is very high. I read a lot of books, blogs and research papers. Favorite book so far is one called Glut — Mastering Information through the Ages. It's one of the best books I've read in months. If you're reading this blog, you'd probably like it. Let me try to paraphrase it a little.
Once upon a time, humans were almost extinct. And then, some 10,000's of years ago, perhaps due to this looming threat, we started to talk. Suddenly, we had the ability to collectively hunt and share and, importantly, manage social hierarchy in large populations. Spoken language laid the ground work for the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Once humans settled down, and spoken language had become common, our populations started to grow. And things got efficient. People started to specialize in making clay pots, or bread, or other essentials. And people started to trade. Of course, trade existed already, but as communities grew, trading became really popular…
Futhermore, as cities grew larger and larger, they did more and more trade with strangers. Trade was no longer based on an honest personal reputation, so some method of recording the truth was required. Receipts! Marks in wet clay tablets kept lists and records of trades.
The author of Glut, Alex Wright, happily points out that all our grandeur of written language came from something as mundane as receipts. People then started to make lists of other things, like the types of animals that existed. Prose formed to extend lists to sentences. Clay was replaced with paper and other forms. In ancient Rome the idea of a book was invented — a revolution of random access to pages.
Occasionally throughout all this, a king would seize a stack of writing and proclaim it a library, which seemed to work well, until some variant of the Vandals came along and burnt it all down. In 1436 The Gutenberg press was invented. Books flourished. Great countries were founded on the strength of written documents . Xerox Parc invented desktop publishing. Blogs. You are Here.
The relative explosion of the of the written word is testament to its worth. It's easy to create, maintain. Cheap to transport. Scannable by the human eye. Easy to automate. And for many, many tasks, including a big part of Help writing, it's the right technology to use.
But, to channel some 4th grader somewhere in the world right now, sometimes "books are Booooring! Just show me how to do it!". Let me put it more scientifically:
If there is a more efficient, or more entertaining way for someone to get the information they seek, they will choose it over written text.
I have to respectively disagree. Obama won the 2008 presidential election in the US. And that is the battle I think written Help faces. In the US you are not required by law to vote. And the same applies to your Help file. People don't have to read that lovely document you've written — they can google for an answer on a forum, or website, or an online video. They can ask the friend sitting next to them. Or they can choose to live without. In the worse case, they will switch to someone else's software or website.
To quote UI&us reader Hywel, via email:
Of course, this is anecdotal evidence. But I suspect it's a common situation. So I'll press the buttons on this computing device a few more times, and then leave it up to you.
When sitting down to write this blogpost, I initially decided to use only text. And that gave me a brief flutter of joy, because writing only text on a blog is much easier than working with images. I later succumbed to a beautiful image of the Rosetta stone, but the point still stands that text is most idiomatic to expressing complex ideas with computers. After all, the web was built on hyper-text. And almost all computer programing uses text. There is a positive bias in computing towards text.
We have an education system in the West built upon the printed word. And rightly so — the printed word has been a boon for distributing and re-distributing exact knowledge to students, for generations. As a result, written text is considered the 'serious' approach to analysis or study. Imagine the quizzical look you'd get if you were to hand in a History assignment as a series of paintings, or dance piece. There is a positive bias in our education towards written text.
We're consuming huge huge quantities of printed language. Do we need or want more? Maybe.
It's OK. Text is still loved. Of course, I'm not claiming we should replace the use of text. You read all of this so you must like text. Or skipped to this bit, which shows off the power of the printed word. But I ask you this: As computing technology is starting to offer us the ability to empower audio and video with true random access and transportability, are we being blinded by our infatuation with the printed word? Is there a cultural text bias? Are we missing better, faster, more efficient, more accurate, more human ways to share ideas?
What do you think?
I Love Text
Now, I love text, language, the written word. I use chat as the communication channel for how I make a living. I can read fast, and my comprehension when reading is very high. I read a lot of books, blogs and research papers. Favorite book so far is one called Glut — Mastering Information through the Ages. It's one of the best books I've read in months. If you're reading this blog, you'd probably like it. Let me try to paraphrase it a little.
The image is a snippet of the Rosetta Stone, image credit: Wikipedia
The History of the Written Word
Once upon a time, humans were almost extinct. And then, some 10,000's of years ago, perhaps due to this looming threat, we started to talk. Suddenly, we had the ability to collectively hunt and share and, importantly, manage social hierarchy in large populations. Spoken language laid the ground work for the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Once humans settled down, and spoken language had become common, our populations started to grow. And things got efficient. People started to specialize in making clay pots, or bread, or other essentials. And people started to trade. Of course, trade existed already, but as communities grew, trading became really popular…
Futhermore, as cities grew larger and larger, they did more and more trade with strangers. Trade was no longer based on an honest personal reputation, so some method of recording the truth was required. Receipts! Marks in wet clay tablets kept lists and records of trades.
- 1 handful of Cinnamon
- 6 sheep
- 1 full measure of grain
- 2 carved ornaments
The author of Glut, Alex Wright, happily points out that all our grandeur of written language came from something as mundane as receipts. People then started to make lists of other things, like the types of animals that existed. Prose formed to extend lists to sentences. Clay was replaced with paper and other forms. In ancient Rome the idea of a book was invented — a revolution of random access to pages.
Occasionally throughout all this, a king would seize a stack of writing and proclaim it a library, which seemed to work well, until some variant of the Vandals came along and burnt it all down. In 1436 The Gutenberg press was invented. Books flourished. Great countries were founded on the strength of written documents . Xerox Parc invented desktop publishing. Blogs. You are Here.
Text Appeal
The relative explosion of the of the written word is testament to its worth. It's easy to create, maintain. Cheap to transport. Scannable by the human eye. Easy to automate. And for many, many tasks, including a big part of Help writing, it's the right technology to use.
But, to channel some 4th grader somewhere in the world right now, sometimes "books are Booooring! Just show me how to do it!". Let me put it more scientifically:
If there is a more efficient, or more entertaining way for someone to get the information they seek, they will choose it over written text.
A comment on Will's post:
"More seriously, if UX or this blog were trying to be Rolling Stone or the Obama campaign gearing up for 2012, Keith is right. But that's not the point."
I have to respectively disagree. Obama won the 2008 presidential election in the US. And that is the battle I think written Help faces. In the US you are not required by law to vote. And the same applies to your Help file. People don't have to read that lovely document you've written — they can google for an answer on a forum, or website, or an online video. They can ask the friend sitting next to them. Or they can choose to live without. In the worse case, they will switch to someone else's software or website.
To quote UI&us reader Hywel, via email:
"When I suddenly needed to do something in DVD Studio Pro (after I asked too much of iDVD), I just stared at the manual for a while. The dry tedious, huge manual. I looked at in print and I looked at in on my screen, ad it didn't make sense. So I paid for a video tutorial. And I spent a couple of hours watching a lot of it. It entirely entertaining, but it was far more engaging that the printed manual. I learned more in a couple of hours than I would have done in a week of reading, and I got my work completed a few days later."
Hywel continues..
"Similarly I wanted to do some stuff with an API for a test management tool. I'm a tester these days, but I used to be a day coder, and although it was recently, it was Pascal on VMS, and I'd type commands like 'Pascal', 'Link' and 'Run', with no IDE. I had a choice of languages, but I picked Java because that's what the devs at work used. I picked Eclipse because that's what the devs at work use. And then I was utterly lost. Any pro application, whether it's Eclipse or Photoshop or DVD Studio Pro is utterly baffling at first. Like an empty canvas. So I had a look on the web and found some marvellous introduction to Eclipse/Java tutorials. They taught me more in a couple of days than reading possibly could. And I didn't need to trouble the devs at work anywhere near as much as I''d anticipated"
Of course, this is anecdotal evidence. But I suspect it's a common situation. So I'll press the buttons on this computing device a few more times, and then leave it up to you.
Idiomatic to Computers
When sitting down to write this blogpost, I initially decided to use only text. And that gave me a brief flutter of joy, because writing only text on a blog is much easier than working with images. I later succumbed to a beautiful image of the Rosetta stone, but the point still stands that text is most idiomatic to expressing complex ideas with computers. After all, the web was built on hyper-text. And almost all computer programing uses text. There is a positive bias in computing towards text.
A System Built on Written Words
We have an education system in the West built upon the printed word. And rightly so — the printed word has been a boon for distributing and re-distributing exact knowledge to students, for generations. As a result, written text is considered the 'serious' approach to analysis or study. Imagine the quizzical look you'd get if you were to hand in a History assignment as a series of paintings, or dance piece. There is a positive bias in our education towards written text.
Text Addiction
- Desktop Publishing
- The spread of the computer
- SMS
- Blogs. Chat. Email
- Amazon
We're consuming huge huge quantities of printed language. Do we need or want more? Maybe.
So What's Next?
It's OK. Text is still loved. Of course, I'm not claiming we should replace the use of text. You read all of this so you must like text. Or skipped to this bit, which shows off the power of the printed word. But I ask you this: As computing technology is starting to offer us the ability to empower audio and video with true random access and transportability, are we being blinded by our infatuation with the printed word? Is there a cultural text bias? Are we missing better, faster, more efficient, more accurate, more human ways to share ideas?
What do you think?
Reader Comments (7)
Loving reading this post, Keith.
You're imho nailing it spot on here!
Nice article Keith. Earned yourself an adding to my feeds ;p
Personally, I think when writing (term used loosely) help docs, go with the medium that best lends itself to what you're trying to explain.
If it's something that can't be described well in text eg. trying to describe the autosum button in Excel. "click on the button with the weird looking E on it".
It could probably be better described using an image of the button. Or alternatively, if you wanted to demonstrate exactly what the button does have a short video of someone entering data, selecting cells, clicking the button and the result of clicking the button.
Alternatively there are things that don't translate well to videos. For example website urls. If you said "uiandus.com" in a video, unless it was in context of UI, or you explicitly spelt it out, most people would try "youiandus.com".
Sure you could spell it out letter by letter, but why repeat yourself, and record 10 seconds of video, when a simple "for more info see: uiandus.com" would do?
In cases like this it's probably best to consider multiple mediums, which would also help with accessibility.
As far as point 2 in the sidenotes: perhaps putting some kind of tracking or analytics in the help might help you write better help?
Ie. if your help stuff is all online, you could use something like Google analytics to figure out which pages are visited most, as well as where users go from there. That way you could figure out if the help page is doing it's job, or if the user has to continue searching.
Also, keeping your help on the web would mean you could easily push out updates to the help files. Downside is that user needs to be online to use it.
Thanks for the kind words Mark.
Video has a long way to come too — I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution. It's hard to embed links, dynamic information and a searchable text 'track' at this time… lots of improvements possible!
Nice post, and good read.
Text can both be used and misused, depending on the context and the target group.
I think it's almost criminal to misuse text, and discourage our new generations from seeking knowledge through our infinite text-repositories.
One example is this post: it would probably be killing if presented to a younger crowd who's eager to learn more.
I don't know. I'm pretty young, and I enjoyed this post as much as other posts with videos or images. Text itself is not bad, you just need to use it where it's most helpful.
For instance, in a tutorial about programming, videos and pictures don't make sense because they don't relay that kind of information as well as text.
However, traffic signs use symbology in images a lot because people driving don't have time to read text and need to know the meaning right away.
Now think about a computer program. Video is extremely helpful in this case because the simple act of showing you how do to something is better than trying with text.
I guess I'd say that if you're trying to provide help for something that you physically do, like move a mouse, push a button, etc. If you're trying to convey an abstract thought or concept, I think words are best suited for that.
Keith,
I haven't finished totally digesting all of this, but I watched Alan Kay's amazing talk "Doing With Images Makes Symbols: Communicating With Computers" (http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987" rel="nofollow">part 1 http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2" rel="nofollow">part 2), and in part 2 he made the point that the part of our brain that processes "English", or any kind of text, is separate from the part of our brain that actually does what we are trying to learn about. We should try to find ways to engage that part of the brain more directly.
quote:
"...So the part of your mentality that understands English dosen't play tennis, can't play tennis. Can't do mathmatics, can't do music. What it can do is talk and comment. And so in general, for learning most things, it is good to find a way of short-circuiting that mentality (that does English) that we think of as the "I" that always trys to take over."
@Vincent
Yes that is a great talk, and covers interesting history in brilliant insights. I like how the lady in the moo moo learns to play tennis by listening to the sound of the ball on the racket — giving her brain some concrete sensory measurement to aim for.
The author of the book GLUT did a google tech talk which covers much of the books ideas, worth a watch:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8
@ Luke
"For instance, in a tutorial about programming, videos and pictures don’t make sense because they don’t relay that kind of information as well as text."
Of course I'm not saying we should not use text anymore, but in some situations it might work better and our prejudice is stopping us from using it in these circumstances. In fact, in the example you give, a text on programming' I would argue would be much improved with some animation, etc. Much of good programming in understanding the structure and flow of an application or system, and an animation often can make it much easier to understand.
As an example, I particularly like the animation on this page, explain the complex cycle of a petrol/gasoline engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_engine