B Y   K A R E N   M O B L E Y
Editor - Hyperviews:Online
Carolina Chapter

Most people go to the beach or the mountains for their summer vacation. I did both at the same time! This July, I went to Seattle, Washington where you can stand on an island beach and admire Mount Rainier, the Cascades, and everything in between. When I wasn’t admiring the view, I was a participant in an International Workshop hosted by the University of Washington's Department of Technical Communication (UWTC). The workshop was the second of what they hope to make an annual event. This summer’s workshop theme was "Reinventing Audience and Task Analysis for the Age of the World Wide Web."  Whew!

So, how do forty-one participants (under-grad and grad students, with a few professors sprinkled in) from Germany, Sweden, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States try to reinvent audience and task analysis? With a lot of direction and work from the instructors running the workshop! This year, Dr. Judy Ramey and the UWTC staff coordinated the workshop. Instructors from the University of Washington and the University of Twente, Netherlands divided aspects of web design into groups and created a heuristic for each group. The instructors hope technical communicators will use these heuristics for both designing and evaluating web sites.

Unlike web design guidelines, heuristics are abstract enough not to be rendered meaningless by changing technology. For example, reducing graphics on a web page so it downloads fast is a guideline that eventually will become meaningless. However, reducing graphics on a web page so users can understand information with less eye strain or confusion will always be in fashion.

During the week, we tested each of the heuristics by using them to evaluate various web sites. Then, we compared notes on how well the heuristics worked and offered suggestions for improvement. The heuristics are undergoing a revision now. Soon we will test the heuristics again (from the comfort of our homes around the world) and report back to the workshop instructors. The final version of these heuristics will hopefully reach all of us in a forthcoming issue of the STC Journal, Technical Communication.

It was exciting to work with web users from around the world. Naturally, we all have different constraints and challenges when using the Web in our countries. Because the heuristics are being tested and evaluated by such a diverse group of people, I’m hoping that the final version of these heuristics will present online technical communicators with a solid foundation for Web design (and probably online design as well).

If you got a cool idea while sunning yourself, please let us know. Remember, lessons learned during your last humdrum project might be next issue's "gotta-read" article. Hyperviews:Online welcomes articles and columns on any facet of technical communication in online information.

Karen Mobley (merlyn@iname.com) is a programmer and technical communicator specializing in online help and web design with IBM Netfinity servers in Research Triangle Park, NC. She has a B.S. in computer science from Clemson University and is pursuing her master’s degree in technical communication at North Carolina State University.