Barker Ch. 11: Laying Out Pages and Screens (Ahles/Hennis)
Guidelines
Barker first starts by giving the six guidelines for designing pages and screens, each containing important information on layout.
1. Review the User Analysis: When you’re going to be designing your layout, be sure to look back at the user analysis you’ve made. This will keep you on the right track.
2. Create Page Grids: This is basically providing a framework for you pages. Basically, you create spaces for all the text, images, headings, and margins that will encompass your page.
3. Define the Page Grid Using Styles: Styles can be an easy and efficient way to map your pages.
4. Draw Thumbnail Sketches: By drawing out the pages text, graphics, and headings in a small line picture, you can outline the proportions of your page. Barker recommends you fold a piece of paper into four-quarter spaces and use each quarter-space as one page.
5. Set up Pages and Styles in Your Word Processor: By saving your styles, you can ensure more consistency in your document. You won’t have to go back and retcon the styles you may have used.
6. Determine the Layout of Help Documents: It’s important to determine how your document’s overall layout will be put together. When making your sketches and styles, keep the overall document in mind.
Modularity
Another important concept that Barker brings up in this chapter is modularity, breaking information down into textual and graphic units to be fitted into one or two pages. For this, Barker recommends breaking down only one task per page. This page should contain all the information the user would need without referencing other tasks. To accomplish this, Barker suggests minimizing cross-referencing, repeating backgrounds, and keep all appropriate steps on one page.
Page Design
For the design of the pages, Barker brings up two kinds of formats: two-column and one-column. With the two-column, the page is divided into a column for text and a column for graphics. In this single, both text and graphics are put into one column. Other elements of page design include:
The Left Margin
Columns
Headers and Footers
Icons and Diagrams
Screen Shots
Rules
Pagination
posted by Wes Ahles | 4:58 PM
9 Comments:
There are 4 people in my department who work in FrameMaker. FrameMaker to WebWorks is how our intranet HTML is created. However, we are not the authors. Our 50+ authors work in Word. We've created a Word template that corresponds tag by tag (except for numbering) with FrameMaker. It makes our conversion process much easier and, more importantly, it allows the authors to build their documentation within a unified structure. It may take a few tries before they have a comfort level with the template, but once they do, they really appreciate it.
I still lament the fact that Barker's #1 guideline (Review the User Analysis) is not something we really cultivate where I work.
In practice this is very easy. When I took my current job I just standardized on Information Mapping and use their template for all of my work. Now all of my documentation has a common look and feel. Furthermore, it is now all modularized in a consistent manner and is ready for primetime - conversin to XML and DITA. Long live standardization.
I was happy to see that Barker discussed thumbnail sketches as part of the designing process of the layout. In all of my graphic design classes, the thing professors really emphasize is planning out your document and drawing thumbnail sketches of your ideas before digitally creating the images. Although this sometimes seems like a lot of extra work, it can really help in creating a good document.
As with anything, the more work you do up front, the less you will have to do on the back end. I think this applies here because if you're not sketching out designs and layouts in the beginning you may find yourself having to do it at the end and therefore sifting through a lot more content. I feel it's also important to do this because it allows for a better visualization of the product and I think people learn a lot with their eyes.
Barker emphasizes the concept of modularity as a tool to help simplify the exposition of technical information. Each 'piece' of information should stand on its own and have limited or no cross-referencing. Modularity means the author can't be lazy and just link or refer a document to some other material; the author has to create content that has a beginning, middle, and end that work together to produce a complete explanation of something. Furthermore, modular content would be much easier to break down into pieces for storage in a content management system. So, while modular content creates more work for the writer, it helps ensure clearer and more consistent content.
I appretiate the discussion about expandable text. I've been having a lot of trouble with the RoboHelp and AuthorIT projects because I'm not sure if my terminology is going to be understandable to a user, but using expandable definitions seems like a logical solution. I wish I would have thought of that.
Unfortunately, I have no experience in this area other than the little bit we've had in tech comm classes. I am afraid I will need more than that to be comfortable with designing the look of the pages. I would be much better off with the writing end of things. I do think these steps sound like good guidelines to follow.
I concur with Emma, my graphic design professor wants us to do a bunch of thumbnail sketches before the actual digital design so we have a good exploration of the possibilities before continuing on.
I agree with Carl when he says “Long Live Standardization”, this is one of my favorite parts about Tech Comm. I usually look at it from an editing standpoint more so then a creation part. That’s because I am still knew to building documents. I usually catch this step and do most of the designing after the main material is finish, which I know to not work a lot of the time. I have made a lot of progress over the years, and I know I have a lot more to go.
I agree that standardization is one of the biggest most helpful parts of tech com. Not only does it look good but it can really help the user of multiple documents find trends and be able to make cinfident choices. In a stadardized world, if you know that you understood the publishers last document you can be confident that the next one will be just as smooth or troublesome, whichever.
I also thought the thumbnail idea was somewhat novel. I have never thought about doing a thumb nail but it is a good way to try different designs before you get down to work. And its always nice to have a visual.
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