An Interaction Designer Who Understands the Need for Documentation

Saturday, February 21st, 2009 | Design / CSS, Team Dynamics, Technical Communication

Yesterday I met with the interaction designer (I’ll call him Joe) on a certain project so that we could discuss text on a few screens he had designed. “I’m not a writer,” he said, “so I have a hard time getting things just right.” To help him phrase the text, I had to understand the screens, so he spent some time explaining the concepts. This was mutually beneficial, since I’ll soon be writing the documentation for those screens.

I mentioned to him that a designer had said that if an application is designed well, it doesn’t need help. Joe smiled and said that it’s what they (meaning the design team or designers in general, I think) refer to as a “sexy thought”—it sounds nice in theory but really isn’t true.

Joe went on to say that complex problems require complex solutions. Since every user is at a different level due to knowledge, skills, and background, what may even be intuitive to one person could be completely dumbfounding to another. Therefore, it’s important to have documentation to provide for people at all skill levels.

I hadn’t thought of it that way before, so I was very appreciative to Joe for giving me that perspective. We like to think of that golden user who will whip through the application without needing very little if any assistance from coworkers, documentation, or tech support. But how many people are really like that? Technical communicators realize that they’re few and far between.

When the problem is complex, being an expert designer doesn’t mean having the ability to make something that’s inherently complex look as simple as flipping on the light switch. Sometimes, the business analysis associated with building an application does help the customers see how their own processes can be improved. But it’s unlikely that a complex business process will be completely overhauled to become a three-step procedure. The expert designer delivers a design that gets the job done in an efficient way.

If the business and therefore the application is complex, the main thing that users need to know is how the system complements the business. That won’t necessarily be intuitive from the application delivered to them. So documentation steps in to help them understand this relationship.

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