For the two years between the time I got married and I graduated from Utah State University, my wife and I lived in a 400-square-foot apartment that we fondly refer to as “The Shoebox.”

Every so often, we’d get in the mood to rearrange the furniture. You wouldn’t think that 400 square feet gave us many options, but we managed it. The funniest part is that we’d both get in the mood to rearrange things on the same night—at about 11:00.

So I have the urge to rearrange things occasionally and to try something new. This is one of those times. In about a week, I’ll have been blogging for two years. Last year on my first anniversary of blogging, I started Gryphon Mountain Tales, “the more mythological side of the Mountain.” This year, I’ve redesigned my site visually. (If you attended my STC webinar on February 10, you got a bit of a preview in the designs of my slides.)

Wanting a change of scenery isn’t the only reason I’ve done this. A better reason is that I think the original design didn’t really fit me anymore; it didn’t fit what I’m trying to convey about myself. The new design, with its header image, tells more about me than the last one did. I’ve got a professional side, but I don’t mind acting like a cartoon character sometimes.

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My first step into Web design was really very primitive and laughable. I was in the Honors version of 2010 English at Utah State University. The 1010 class was your basic writing composition class, and 2010 was the next step up. Both were required as general classes, but I had obtained the equivalent credits in high school. But for the Honors program, I had to take the 2010 English class.

The instructor added a Web dimension to the regular writing assignments by having us design webpages for our essays and other pieces. This was back in the day when the default background color in Web browsers was medium gray. The first page I did had a medium gray background and was done I believe in FrontPage (does that exist anymore?). It was pretty sad by today’s standards. The others I did for that class weren’t much nicer.

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The main stakeholder for one of my projects has asked for a procedural user guide for certain tasks in the application performed by particular user roles. It will be comparable to a manual I did for another application for the same stakeholder; that one was organized first by role and then by task. The business process was heavily intertwined with some of the software procedures in that manual. This next one may be the same way, though it won’t be as substantial a project because not nearly as many tasks will be included.

In that previous manual, I had a side column for note boxes, but the rest of the information was contained in the main column. Many different kinds of information were mixed in that main flow of content, with only some being set off by some style or another. I think that’s a bit problematic. Users wouldn’t be able to tell readily which type of information they happened to be looking at all the time.

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While filing my income tax return online, I noticed that the primary way the website offered user assistance was through questions worded in first person. Each screen provided four to six questions that had to do with that particular screen. This caught my attention partly because I had just been thinking about empathetic user assistance. When I clicked a question, the corresponding information opened in a small pop-up window in the center of my screen.

I’ve wondered how different my job would be if we offered user assistance this way. I like to design some of the user interaction myself, whereas in projects like this tax site I used, it seems like the Web designer took care of that part, and all the technical writer (assuming there was one) did was supply questions and answers to be plugged in.

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I’ve noticed that lately, I’ve been choosing something other than bold formatting for high-level headings. Sans-serif typefaces like Arial and Verdana are commonly used as headings, and when they get beyond about 14 points, they start looking a little too heavy.

The fact that the heading is in a larger font and is surrounded by white space sets it apart from body text, so bolding can be unnecessary anyway. Instead of bolding, I sometimes like to set headings apart using some additional visual cue like color (which may or may not help, depending on whether you have users that are colorblind) or a graphical indicator. An icon, vertical lines, background shading, or gradients can be part of a heading style and readily suggest to the reader that something is different about that text.

I’ve started to favor these alternatives, and I think they have added to the visual interest of the overall documents.

I started using rounded rectangles in some diagrams when I saw a flowchart that an interaction designer did. Later, my colleague Tom began using them in some quick reference guides, so I did the same in one guide and some release notes. I liked how they looked, but I don’t use them all the time, because there can be too much of a good thing.

It has made me wonder why rounded corners are appealing. There are plenty of sites explaining how to do rounded corners, specifically for websites and in InDesign, but not much discussion about why they have become popular.

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When reviewing screen text with an interaction designer, I suggested he drop the word “please” from some text phrased something like, “To do such-and-such, please do this and that.” I said that it’s instructional text, so we’re just telling the user how to do something, not really requesting that they do it.

He told me the reason he did that was to help create what is called an “empathetic interface.” We ended up agreeing on more concise wording than the original, and we left out “please.”

What Empathy Means

I thought about what an empathetic interface would be, especially where it concerns tech comm, and I looked up the word to remind myself of what it means. Empathy is defined on Dictionary.com as “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.”

So an empathetic interface is more than a polite or friendly one. I have been using a particular site that, after I sign in, has a greeting in the header with my name and “good morning” or “good afternoon,” and so on, depending on the time of day. WordPress itself says, “Howdy, Ben” when I sign in. I thought at first that perhaps this was an empathetic interface, but based on the definition above, I think it’s merely polite.

From the definition, I expect that it’s part of a technical communicator’s job to create empathetic interfaces and content. It’s our responsibility to understand the user’s position, thoughts, feelings, and so on so that we can provide the right assistance.

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