Coe’s purpose is to assist technical communicators in understanding the users of their products, so they can make the products useful. The book reflects the author’s experience as a communicator, educator, and industrial psychologist. The primary audience consists of designers, writers, editors, and testers of technical information working in the field, although Coe ultimately wants to reach those responsible for the quality of technical information products.
The book is divided into four sections. In the first six chapters, Coe covers the sensory and perceptual processes that people employ when using information. She covers sensation and perception, learning, memory, problem solving, and reading. These areas give communicators a fundamental understanding of human physiological and psychological constraints and of the strengths of humans as information processors.
The second section consists of a single chapter that emphasizes the value of creating communicator-user partnerships that foster collecting information about users’ needs and practices, in order to serve them better. In the third section, Coe covers the development of the subtext of the information being presented. Finally, the fourth section considers the design and development of information content.
Each chapter contains recommendations for further reading that seem to be reasonably current, but that would have been more useful if they had been organized by subject rather than alphabetically. There are two appendices. One covers multicultural factors; the other directs the reader seeking more involvement to organizations and online resources. An adequate index is provided.
Throughout the text, in keeping with her dictum--“keep users at the heart of everything you do in designing and developing information”--Coe uses examples from technical communication to illustrate the general principles under discussion. This demonstrates the professional approach to producing technical communication presented in the book. Examples give readers a clearer idea of how general, abstract principles apply to specific, concrete situations. With this feature, the book earns a place on the select list of books that successfully transfer findings from one field to another. Giving users a view of new information in their real-life situations fosters a natural development of immediately useful schemas.
Coe has done a good job of selecting psychological principles from a field that notoriously does not promulgate a single theory but prefers to offer a selection of theories to explain data. Her decision to choose specific theories rather than present an overview of cognitive psychology is entirely appropriate for her audience. The principles she presents will be immediately useful to the working communicator. The list of further readings allows readers interested in a particular topic to discover that it is not always as clear-cut as Coe presents it. At the same time, she permits beginning readers to establish a basic schema, without the confusion of myriad interpretations from which they are unprepared to choose.
Coe covers both traditional printed documentation and online documentation. The majority of the book is devoted to building the foundation of technical communication, the subtext--areas important to successful use of the material that are frequently seen as subordinate to the content. The subtext areas are the medium, whether printed or electronic; the navigational infrastructure, which provides the skeleton for the information; and the appearance of the information, including layout and fonts.
Text is, of course, the content. The chapter about text continues Coe’s emphasis on preparation by identifying three critical things a communicator must have before worrying about content: an understanding of the physical and psychological processes that compose the users’ world; the users’ profiles; and the information’s subtext profile. Only after building these tools is the communicator ready to begin the text profile, consisting of defining and responding to the problem. By phrasing and defining problems in users’ terms, the communicator ensures that the solutions are also part of the users’ world view.
The appendix on cultural differences is particularly interesting. Coe discusses ten areas, ranging from grammatical constructions to acceptable icons to variation in the meanings of colors. Each concern is discussed in some detail, with examples that are easily understood.
All in all, this book meets its objective well. Although it lacks textbook exercises, its information is valuable. I recommend it to professional communicators.
