I learned a lot about document design as a whole and how ethics can play a role in it from studying these four readings. Some overall themes emerged from all four sources. One is that it’s very important to consider the needs of the audience when designing documentation. This can be an important ethical consideration because document designers should strive to have no harm come from their document. Another overall theme was that there are several principles of document design that can affect a reader’s experience such as typography, color choice, bold face or italics, use of headings, composition, images/videos/visuals, and more. Several of the sources pointed out color contrast as being especially important. I will now transition into reviewing each of the sources separately.
My first source is a survey of opinions on the ethics of various document design scenarios. Dragga (1996) conducted a national survey where 500 technical communicators and 500 technical communication teachers were asked to “assess the ethics of seven document design cases” (p. 255). The assessment used a 5-point scale where 1 is completely ethical and 5 is completely unethical. The participants were also asked to explain why they decided a scenario was ethical or not. The seven questions described several different document design scenarios where ethics should be considered such as shrinking or enlarging type size to fit less or more information on a page, using persuasive coloring, manipulating visual information, and readability. The main findings were that the majority of participants decided these were “ethical design practices” (p. 262): altering type size to fit more or less information on a page, the use of persuasive colors, and using spacing to direct the audience’s attention. The majority also considers the manipulation of visual information to be unethical. One situation, using typography to decrease readability, divided participants as some saw it as ethical and others did not.
Dragga classified the explanations that participants gave for their answers into nine categories: common practices of technical communication, specifications, reader’s responsibility, writer’s responsibility, writer’s intention, consequences, judgments, principals, and insufficient information. The most common explanation type was consequences-based. This means that the majority of participants focused on how these specific scenarios could create consequences for the reader, organization, or the writer. The explanation type of “writer’s responsibility” was also significant and is similar to an important theme of McCormick’s (2020) source which I also looked at. Both of these sources address how authors of documents need to consider their audience’s needs when creating documentation.
McCormick’s (2020) article discusses how instructors can create classroom and instructional documents that meet the needs of their Generation Z students. McCormick designed a study where nine documents from different courses were studied to see “what graphic design elements are used” (p. 1). Documents were noted as “yes” or “no” for the following elements: bold face, italics, underlining, all caps, images/videos, color, graphics, tables, lists, descriptive URLs, and charts/graphs. The findings were that all documents used bold face and lists, and most used italics and underlining. Few used color and most documents were lacking images, graphics, and videos which are all “greatly desired by Gen Z” (p. 1). McCormick challenges instructors to find places where they can replace text with visual information and to consider forms of multimodal delivery to engage their Gen Z audience.
One difference I found between this source and Dragga’s article was that this article emphasizes the importance of visual information much more so than Dragga does. This may be because of the difference of the article age, as Dragga’s was written in 1996 and McCormick’s was written in 2020. Visual communication has become much more prominent since Dragga’s article was written.
Sentell’s (2016) paper focuses on what makes memorable documents and the principles of making documents more effective for audiences. He argues that “communication is more effective and powerful if the reader can easily remember it” (p. 137). Sentell created a study where twenty subjects were asked to walk down a high school hallway that had many flyers and posters. He then interviewed them immediately after and one week later to see which posters stay in their memories. The results showed that the three most frequent answers participants gave when asked why they remembered certain posters were contrast color, relevance, and schema. Schema refers to the societal roles one has and how that affects their view of the world. One of Sentell’s main takeaways was that “schema seem to influence judgments of relevance, which in turn influence attention and encoding” (p.144). The poster that was most frequently remembered made use of bright colors and a high level of contrast between those colors. The poster in second place made use of an existing schemata for most people, a racecar driver and anti-drunk driving messages. Sentell concludes with a heuristic technical communicator can use to make their documents more memorable: “1. Convey practical value. 2. Use contrast, color, and imagery. 3. Tap the familiar. 4. Use unexpected elements. 5. Build social currency. 6. Arouse emotion” (p. 147).
This article was similar to McCormick’s analysis on communicating to Gen Z in that they both emphasize the importance of color usage in documentation. They also both note that color can draw the audience’s attention and make documents retain in their memory.
The topic of this reading is how document design affects reading and information acquisition for readers with different language backgrounds. Han & Kaguera (2020) designed a study where participants were split up into two groups- native speakers of Japanese and non-native speakers. Participants were shown eight Japanese web documents (with different styles of document design) and were then given a comprehension test on the contents of the document. The results showed that both groups comprehended information very well when it was formatted in a hierarchical structure (one page but there is access to other pages through a table of contents page). Another interesting result was that the non-native speakers had the highest level of comprehension when the document was structured relationally, meaning the page had access to related content through hyperlinks and attachments. The structure that had the lowest comprehension was networked, where the page has links to other content pages by means of a navigation bar.
Introduction to Document Design
References for Document Design