Also loved this statement “Sometimes we forget just how much we know”. Nice.

Ha ha, what a great comment! It made me think of our own “warning” boxes, which currently have an icon of a no-entry sign. That’s the default icon which Confluence wiki uses for a warning message. Sometimes it has occurred to me, when seeing a warning box at the top of a page, that it seems to tell people “Don’t enter here”. When in actual fact, we really do want them to enter the page and read the information. It should say, “Come in, there’s some really important stuff for you to know”.

Cheers
Sarah

But I also recall reading that, while people might be less likely to read pulled-out warning text, it helps to be able to point to it when you get to court.

We use lots of cautionary notes and warnings, although we also try to use inline warnings as well. I think of the inline warnings as being for the readers, and the bright red “don’t cut your hand off” boxes with the lurid graphic as being for the lawyers.

I’d love to hear the results of that user testing! Interestingly, I was running a writing workshop for a group of HR people within our company this week. We chatted a bit about banner blindness, and the responses differed from person to person. Some people say their eyes are drawn immediately to text in boxes, because they know that’s likely to be the most important. Others said they read the main body of the page. Of course, what people say isn’t necessarily what they do.

Good point about stacked boxes. We sometimes do have a number of notes on a page, but then the tech writers put them in a bullet list under a heading like “notes” or “before you start”. Other people who update our docs, such as the support engineers or developers, do tend to stack note and warning boxes merrily.

Cheers
Sarah

I also have banner blindness, but I don’t place boxes like Notes and Warnings in the same category as ad banners. However, I think that sometimes we use Notes to present information that could be presented in a better way. I cringe whenever I see “stacked” Note boxes on a page.

I think that this issue would make a great user test. I’ll put such a test on my list of action items and let you know if/when we run it.

Melody

“Developing Quality Technical Information” by Gretchen Hargis, et al. has several useful criteria for what makes for high-quality documents, such as task-oriented, accurate, complete, clear, concrete, well organized/structured, retrievable, visually effective. However, most of these criteria cannot be quantified easily and most cannot be automated reliably. They usually require one or several human judges which makes the whole benchmarking process quite costly.

For a more extensive discussion and resources, see my blog post http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/improve-documentation-with-quality-metrics/

Great points! Perhaps we also tend to increase the banner blindness in our readers, by adding side panels for navigation, top panels for menu options, bottom panels for related topics… I certainly find myself homing in on the plain, readable text. The good old bullet list, with bold words indicating the key points, are usually a good indication of the meat of a topic.

Cheers
Sarah

That’s a great point, that it’s annoying when you are forced to skip over the boxes just to keep the flow of the normal text. It makes me think we should put the boxes off to one side, perhaps in a margin.

Thanks for dropping by.
Cheers
Sarah