Volume 7, Issue 2, March-April 2007
Board Member Interview: Paul Doyle
The Magical
Number: Seven, Plus or Minus Two
Fewer Tech Writing Job Posts on Craigslist?
First Round of Judging for STC Annual Competition
Editorial:
Should you pay your membership dues?
Sponsor Profile: Volt
Technical Resources
November saw a flurry of activity. Our Jobs Fair
attracted over seventy technical communicators. Hosted at the DigiPen
Institute, attendees had the opportunity to listen to presentations by
several employment organizations about the latest trends in the job
market.
Our Saturday afternoon hands-on computer workshops
continued with valuable training from Scott DeLoach in October and
Brian Wood in November. We are currently lining up our workshops for
the Spring - February, March, and April.
Our annual competition
attracted over 120 projects from throughout the Puget Sound area. A new
twist was having the lion's share of the judging take place on one
Saturday in November. We would like to thank the fifty members who
contributed their expertise on that day. Our chapter also received
support from remote judges located around the world. The remote judges
reviewed web-based projects for us. The recipients of Excellent and
Distinguished Awards will be on display at our Competition Showcase
meeting in January. We hope you will be able to participate.
Our single event in December will be our Holiday Party,
and we expect it to be a lot of fun. We have reserved the Science
Fiction Museum at the Experience Music Project for our exclusive use on
the evening of Thursday, December 14. The event is FREE for members and
non-members if you register by Friday, December 8. The fee is $20 per
person after that. You are encouraged to bring spouses, partners, and
friends. Children are welcome.
Thanks,
Web Services Manager, formerly known as webmaster.
What are your official duties as a member of the board?
I
maintain the website, which includes adding new features, writing any
code, maintenance, and answering questions that any user may have. It
is pretty rare that I actually post content these days.
How long have you been in this position? How long have you
been a member
of STC?
I
have had this position for about a year and a half. I think I have been
a member for 2 years or so. It didn't take me too long to start
volunteering.
What is your job/career outside of STC?
I am a web developer and project manager.
Do you feel like the work you do with STC benefits your career
in any
way? Or vice versa?
Definitely.
When I was managing my first project at work I remember using things I
had learned as webmaster. What I learned when putting the content
management system in place has had multiple applications at work.
What have you done to bring new things to the STC table?
I
put in the content management system for our website. Everyone who has
used the website over the years will notice the differences, but for
anyone who has posted content this is a big change. Just this week, I
added RSS feeds for our events and jobs, and installed a new system to
email newsletters to our members.
What do you enjoy the most about STC?
I
like the informative meetings and events the chapter puts together.
I've always appreciated the networking, too. It is very friendly.
If
you were to meet someone who was interested in filling your post next
year on the STC Board, what kind of skills would you tell them they
needed to have? What advice would you pass along to them?
It is a great place to start if you want to learn about running a content management system (CMS). You'll need patience because the site is open source and documentation isn't always available. The skills you need are wide ranging depending on what you want to do, but for the most part you need to understand standard programming concepts like loops and if statements, HTML, XML, Cascading Style Sheets, be able to run an FTP program, and possibly some basic Python.
Anyone who has worked in technical communication long enough will have come across the magical number “seven, plus or minus two”. It’s often quoted by trainers such as myself as a guideline governing anything from the number of categories of information that you should include in a Web site through to the number of steps in a procedural Help topic. Over recent years many of us have been guilty of applying it without being fully aware of its origin; we typically have some vague idea that it concerns a limitation of the human brain that prevents us from being able to process more than nine items effectively, but few of us know the details of the original research that produced the concept of this magical number. And still fewer of us choose to question its applicability to information design – it’s far too convenient a rule of thumb to risk invalidating it!
This article explains the origin of the magical number, "seven, plus or minus two" and discusses the extent to which using it as a golden rule for information design is justified.
The term “seven, plus or minus two” was coined by George Miller 50 years ago when he wrote an article in the Psychological Review journal. It’s interesting to note that at that time computers were in their infancy, and no one had even begun to imagine the concept of GUI-based software applications, Help files, and the World Wide Web – so clearly the concept of “seven, plus or minus two” was not intended as an aid for designing such information systems. As a matter of fact, George Miller was writing purely from the viewpoint of a cognitive psychologist, and his article made no reference to the field of technical communication whatsoever.
The article described a variety of psychological experiments that fell under three distinct categories:
Absolute judgement (the ability to distinguish between musical tones or other stimuli)
Subitizing (the ability to recognize numbers)
Short-term memory
Despite the fact that these categories appear unrelated to one another, all three areas of experimentation seemed to indicate that the number seven was somehow significant.
George Miller cited several examples of research in this area. A typical example is the experiment conducted by I. Pollack in 1952: he asked listeners to correctly identify a series of tones that were evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale. With up to five or six different tones, listeners rarely confused them. But with significantly more tones, they made frequent mistakes. The conclusion was that most people have an upper limit that is the region of seven tones. Other experiments showed that the same results hold for variations of loudness, or brightness, of saltiness (when tasting food), and in fact of any one-dimensional variable.
Subitizing means being able to judge the number of a collection of randomly arranged items more or less instantly. The common die (or dice) used in many board games relies on a human’s capacity to be able to recognize the numbers from one to six without hesitation. Even if the dots were not arranged in their familiar patterns, most people would still be able to call the numbers without needing to actually count them.
Miller described the research of Kaufman, Lord, Reese, and Volkmann at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. They flashed patterns of dots on to a screen for 1/5 of a second, and asked observers to report on the number of dots. For up to six dots there were almost no errors. Above that number, however, inaccuracies began to creep in, and for significantly higher numbers observers could only provide a rough estimate. So again, seven appears to be the significant number where change occurs.
George Miller referred to a number of experiments on short-term memory, all of which indicated a limit of around seven items. However, Miller was anxious to point out the difference between these results and the ones relating to absolute judgement. He explained that absolute judgement is limited by the amount of information, whereas the span of short-term memory is limited to the number of items or chunks. A chunk could potentially contain multiple bits of information; for example, most of us would have no problem remembering five three-syllable words, where the number of actual sounds or syllables that we are remembering totals 15. By combining (or what Miller called "recoding") information into chunks, we can remember more than 7 bits of information. This explains why long telephone numbers are split into groups of two, three, or four numbers, and is also the principal behind many of the tricks and methods for performing what appear to be fantastic feats of memory.
Contrary to the urban legend that has developed around the number seven since the original article, Miller himself was far from certain about its status as a magical number. In concluding his article he suspected that the recurrence of the number seven in the three categories of research described above was “only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.” His summarizing remarks were actually more general observations relating to human limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. He expressed the view that recoding is an important process that deserved further research, and he has since gone on to oversee the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language.
One obvious application of the magical number is as a limiting factor for the number of items in hierarchical navigation systems such as tables of content, menus, and Web site home pages. In 1998, two researchers from Microsoft, Kevin Larson and Mary Czerwinski, decided to compare the effectiveness of three different navigation structures that all led to a set of information articles taken from the Encarta Encyclopedia. The navigation structures were each organized as follows:
The total number of available information articles was in each case 512.
Larson and Czerwinski requested their test subjects to locate specific articles using each of the three navigation structures in turn, and measured their performance in terms of the time taken and the number of errors or dead-ends. To their surprise, they found that the first navigation structure (the only one to conform to the "seven, plus or minus two" rule for the number of menu options) was actually the least successful. It turned out that the number of decisions that the subjects had to make during the navigation process was actually more critical than the number of options presented at each decision point.
Other commentators have since added fuel to the argument against over-reliance on the rule. As D. LeCompte put it in a 1999 paper for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, “knowing that most people can successfully remember between 5 and 9 items about half of the time gives us virtually no useful guideline for design of user interfaces.”
Is there any reason why we should be unhappy with a procedure containing only three steps since it falls outside the magical range? Should we limit the number of steps in a procedure to nine?
The answer to the first of these questions is almost certainly no. In fact there is an argument that, if you need your audience to remember a set of instructions in the correct order, then you are pushing your luck if you include more than three steps. The answer to the second question is: “it depends”. The factors that influence the number of steps that users can process successfully include:
• Whether the user’s environment allows them to read
the instructions and carry out the steps simultaneously
• Whether the user needs to remember the steps, or simply
carry them out successfully as they read the instructions
• The user’s familiarity with the context and subject matter
• The complexity of the language of the instructions
• The length of each step
According to Susan Harkus in a 2003 paper: “the principle is simple: design decisions are relative to the usage context and the nature of the information.”
Information Mapping is a widely used system for structuring and presenting information both on screen and in printed form. The reason for mentioning it in this article is that it is heavily based around the number seven; it identifies seven fundamental types of information, and also recommends breaking information into no more than seven sections.
The Information Mapping® method was initially described by Robert Horn in 1966 and thoroughly documented in 1969 in Information Mapping for Learning & Reference (Horn, Nicol, Klienman & Grace, 1969). Interestingly, the original documentation and justification of the Information Mapping® method makes no reference either to Miller or to any of the research cited by Miller in his article. However, I think it very likely that Horn was aware of Miller’s work, and may well have been inspired by the idea of a “magical number” as he undertook the task of devising a set of memorable guidelines for information design.
The benefits of Information Mapping® have been demonstrated though a number of tests and surveys. As an example, in 1994 the County of San Diego surveyed more than 480 people who had received both a traditional and an “information mapped” document. Of those people, more than 80% preferred the Mapped document because it was simpler, easier to identify the main points, and more concise. However, it is debatable whether this proves the magical properties of the number seven. It may simply be an indication that a document that has been carefully structured, laid out, and signposted using common sense principles is easier to use than a less well-structured document – which would hardly be a surprise to our technical communication community.
The use of the “seven, plus or minus two” guideline in the field of navigation design and information architecture is a tempting rule of thumb. However, the research into cognitive psychology that led to George Miller’s original article has doubtful direct relevance to our field of technical communication, and many commentators have urged caution in treating the number seven with undue respect. Our choice of the number of items in a list, the number of sections in a table of contents, and so on, should be influenced by a number of factors – not least, the nature of the cognitive task that is presented to the user, and the existing knowledge that the user brings to the task. If we reject the rule of thumb, do we have a better one with which to replace it? Perhaps three (the number of items that almost everyone can remember in any order) is a potential candidate for “magical number” status?
Originally published in ISTC's Communicator Journal
(Summer 2006).
Matthew has 19 years experience as a user assistance professional in the software industry. Much of this time was spent managing a team of writers and trainers at a UK-based consultancy company, before enjoying a period in the U.S. as Director of the WinWriters (now WritersUA) Conference. Matthew has been a popular speaker at WritersUA events throughout the world since 1997, and has covered a diverse range of topics from context-sensitive Help, to the Spice Girls. He now runs his own independent UK-based training and consulting company that specializes in online Help design and technology. Matthew holds a B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering and a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education from Bristol University in the UK. He is a certified instructor for RoboHelp, Captivate, and WebWorks ePublisher Pro. Matthew's website is www.ellisonconsulting.com.
Beginning October 21, Craigslist.org instituted a $25 fee per job posting for its Seattle-area website. Craigslist has made a name through providing free online space for people to buy, sell, and trade goods and services locally.
Craigslist administrators were hoping to stem the flow of fake job postings, scams, and pyramid scheme opportunities that seemed to abound in most job posting areas. Other cities, such as San Francisco, New York, and Boston had already implemented similar or larger fees for job postings, and had seen a significant reduction in fake job postings as a result.
Prior to the fee implementation, Seattle's Craigslist technical writing jobs had averaged 6.1 postings per day in September/October. Following the fee, the number of job postings has plummeted to roughly 1.7 postings per day. Previously, many of the job postings had come from area agencies such as Sakson & Taylor and Volt. These agencies typically post available jobs on subscription-based job search engines such as Monster and CareerBuilder.
Other job categories on Seattle's craigslist have also seen a steep decline in the number of average daily job postings. Although hiring usually slows during the holiday season, area recruiters claim that this holiday season has been busier than usual.
STC Puget Sound's Annual Competition kicked off on Saturday, November 4, as more than 40 veteran technical communicators descended upon the University of Washington's Loew Hall to assess this year's 120 entries.
In the past, STC Puget Sound volunteers had participated in a much longer judging process, with teams of judges being assigned several entries, given weeks to judge the materials and provide written comments. Although the process allowed for some very detailed and thoughtful comments, it was often difficult for judges to find time to meet with their assigned judging partners and it was easy to get bogged down in the judging process. This year, STC Puget Sound followed the lead of other STC chapters, such as Vancouver, BC, by holding the first round of judging on a single day.
Judges teamed up in pairs to examine, critique and rate entries. Each entry was given ample time (depending on the size of the entry, anywhere from an hour to several hours).
STC provided breakfast and lunch for the event. Judges provided pages of written commentary for each entry, as is the custom. Some judges from outside the Puget Sound area also participated in judging some of the online entries via the internet.
Puget Sound STC would like to thank Dave Farkus and the University of Washington for facilitating and hosting this event.
The next round of judging, in which the Best of Show entries will be assessed, will take place on Saturday, December 9, from 10AM to 2PM, at the Kirkland Public Library (www.kcls.org). This is a great way to get a close look at all of the top entries.
We
need to revise our job descriptions. Rather than authoring printed
manuals and on-line help panels, we should be involved in or leading
projects that make them unnecessary. Why? Because consumers
increasingly demand intuitive interfaces to the products they use.
Users and administrators of more complex products expect interfaces
that guide them through decisions rather than require them to read
details. We must stay ahead of this trend, rather allow ourselves to be
flattened by it.
Examples of intuitive interfaces to technology abound on the Internet.
Who isn't familiar with Amazon.com?
The site will create your store and update the information it displays
based on your previous searches and purchases. After you buy something,
Amazon easily lets you track your purchase as it makes its way to you.
You don't need documentation to use the site effectively.
But Amazon.com hires technical writers. I found this job description on
their careers site:
Look at the emphasis here:
"drive platform improvements," "ensure the experience is smooth and
problem free," "lead initiatives," "(help users) quickly and
efficiently launch and manage their stores." Not your traditional job
description, is it?
And here's a qualification for that same job that you don't see every
day:
I thought only managers desired to consolidate and
streamline
workflow. It shows you how things are changing.
Now consider http://www.pandora.com/.
Created by the Music Genome Project, Pandora asks you questions and
customizes an Internet radio station based on your responses. When I
started out, Pandora asked me the name of a group or a song. I
responded "The Beatles." So it played a tune from the first Beatles LP,
"Please Please Me." I gave that song a "thumbs up." Pandora next played
something by The Who. I gave that song a "thumbs up." The next song
played got a "thumbs down," and so on. The site also gave me an
opportunity to tune my preferences — naming another group or another
song I liked.
The engineers at Pandora analyzed hundreds of
thousands of songs and tagged them with attributes, which they then
stored in a database. For example, that Who song I liked, "Glittering
Girl," has these attributes:
When
I responded to a song, Pandora referred to its database and offered me
a choice with similar attributes, refining the mix each time. The site,
as the New York Times puts it, provides a stream of
music with
similar DNA, micro-tailored to each user's tastes. I needed no
documentation to use Pandora — I simply interacted with the site and
got results. Can you see how similar technology and analysis could
yield a site providing a stream of relevant information micro-tailored
to your needs as you use a software application or attempt to install a
client or a server?
I certainly can. Last year my company rolled
out something similar to, but not as sophisticated as Pandora — the
first phase of "user personalized documents." Now EMC users can visit a
company website, choose among several system characteristics, and
receive a customized document based on those choices. Customized
documents comprise XML chunks stored in a database and rendered into
PDF format.
Writers at my company were involved with chunking
material and writing the rules combining chunks. Still, as I've
suggested, the trend is toward having a user rely on documents like
these only when stuck or when attempting to do something complex or
extraordinary. Otherwise, why bother? The interface should step me
through the process.
I'm not suggesting that the need for
printed documents and help panels will vanish. I do foresee these
products becoming a commodity, and their production being shipped to
lower cost workers. We'll continue to write, but our value will be in
designing interactive scripts or shaping the repositories of
information tapped when using sites like Amazon, Pandora, or my
company's UPD. We'll be doing more developing content re-use and
single-sourcing strategies and less employing various authoring and
desktop publishing tools to produce printed or electronic publications
and integrated online help systems. And that's fine with me — learning
and doing new things should be second nature to anyone whose career is
in technology.
Reference
"The New Tastemakers," by Jeff Leeds. The New York Times,
September 3, 2006
Michael can be reached at mtharvey@yahoo.com.
This article was originally published on the STC newsletter the Carolina
Communiqué.
The New Year is quickly approaching, and so is the STC membership renewal date. STC membership is aligned with the calendar year - from January to December. If you want to maximize your membership benefits, it makes sense to do it earlier, rather than later. For many technical communicators, membership renewal is something that we plan for each year. For others, there is a question as to whether or not membership is worth the cost; many people have to do some serious cost-benefit analysis before making a decision. And for some of us, it is simply not affordable.
It might surprise you to know that, in my opinion, taking out a formal membership may not be the most cost effective investment for you, or for us.
As chapter president, one of the hardest things to explain to brand new members is why we charge them to attend local chapter meetings. New members will have paid $150 to the Society to be a member of STC, only to discover that their local chapter wants an additional $20 (or more) for each local event. Where did the $150 go? What do new members get for their hard-earned money? This critical aspect of membership costs is not explained when you sign up.
The unfortunate economic
reality is that, following the dotcom bust, STC's revenues declined
significantly. International leadership needed to adjust services and
expenditures accordingly; however, one of the only significant areas
that was cut has been the amount of dues revenue that is distributed to
the local chapters. While the Arlington office has spent millions of
dollars on office rent and salaries, the local chapter leaders appear
to have no substantive input in the process - despite the
dramatic
negative effects the monetary cuts have had on services at the
grassroots level.
For this current chapter year, 2006-07, your local Puget Sound Chapter is scheduled to receive a total of $7,095 for our 558 members from the international Society coffers. That works out to just over $12 per member. We receive less than 10% of the $150 that each member pays to the Arlington office.
Our local chapter simply cannot carry out quality events on $12 per member per year. The moderately priced venues that we use for events cost us, on average, approximately $1,000 for 50 attendees. That's $20 apiece for a single get-together. If we were to rely solely on our cut of the membership dues, we would be $8 in the hole after hosting just one chapter meeting.
And that doesn't include the cost of credit card processing, AV equipment, or promotional expenses. It doesn't include any fees or expenses for our visiting speakers. It also doesn't cover the cost of maintaining our web site, or the cost of sending out emails to our members. All of the planning and implementation of the events is done through the volunteer efforts of our members. Essentially, your local chapter is on its own when it comes to generating adequate income for local events.
As a personal mission, I have been trying to convince our international leaders to be more fiscally responsible, and to give a greater share to the chapters. Unfortunately, the chapter cuts continued this year.
So, let's get back to the question of whether or not an individual should take out a formal membership.
If you only have a couple hundred bucks to put toward professional advancement for the coming year AND you find our chapter events to be of interest, I suggest you consider spending your money locally. You'll find great value in paying ala carte for our local meetings, workshops, and networking events. Attending a full year's worth of local activities will cost roughly $150-$200.
For every dollar that comes into our chapter bank account, 100% of it goes into services that directly benefit you. For example, our upcoming holiday party and the upcoming Competition Showcase are free to everyone. And whether or not you pay dues to the International Society, our chapter welcomes all technical communication professionals equally. We don't make any distinctions at events between members and non-members. Members do receive discounts on certain local events. However, those discounts are subsidized completely by your local Puget Sound chapter - not the international STC.
Membership in the International Society does have privileges: you get to say you are a member, and many employers prefer that their employees are members of professional societies. You get to vote for candidates and on issues, and you receive STC’s award-winning publications (if you have a full membership). Personally, I will continue to be a member because I interact regularly with members around the world for my business.
Whichever method of economic support you choose, the technical communication profession appreciates your investment and we wish you the best success in achieving your goals.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you decide to take out an STC membership, please indicate in your membership form that you wish to be affiliated with the Puget Sound Chapter. We only receive funds for a portion of your dues if you have chosen our chapter specifically as part of your membership. Even if you are an infrequent participant at local events, we can use your support in this manner. It doesn't cost you anything extra.
VOLT is one of STC Puget Sounds sponsors. STC Puget Sound is grateful for VOLT's support, both through financial contributions and through the efforts of VOLT staff, who serve STC in a variety of volunteer capacities, from event coordination to board member positions.
Well-crafted technical and creative communication requires top talent to execute on message and on time. As a leading provider of workforce solutions, Volt connects qualified professionals with diverse business opportunities, creating scenarios for extraordinary results. “It’s our diversity in work opportunities and talent that attracts people to Volt,” said Garret Janney, Regional Manager for Volt Technical and Creative Communication. “During our 50-year history, we’ve gained a solid reputation among Fortune 100 and Fortune 1,000 companies. We not only present the most qualified candidates, but the right person with complementary talents, attitudes and expertise. And, our candidates enjoy workplace choices with the high-tech giants, manufacturing, creative services, aerospace and financial services,” Janney said.
Volt is a $2 billion Fortune 1,000 company, delivering talent, services and technology to 10,000 customers and placing more than 225,000 employees annually across the U.S., Asia, Canada and Europe. More than 900 recruitment specialists and 400 servicing locations comprise Volt’s niche recruiting strength.
Whether you’re an individual looking for unique access to intriguing projects and interesting work, or a business leader looking for today’s most sought-after technical or creative talent, Volt will deliver the right connection. Volt Technical and Creative Communication’s highly skilled recruitment specialists have the passion, expertise and reach to consistently deliver optimal solutions, whether the position is professional placement/direct hire, contract or contract-to-direct.
Contact a local Volt Technical and Creative
Communication
location for more information.
Bothell 425.806.1900 / techcomm@volt.com