Readability/Usability/Quality 1-98 (March 1998) by Lars Forsslund

The heading is the title of a book, relatively lately translated into Swedish. It has created some fuss in cultural circles. In France the book was published already in 1978 under the title La Vie mode d`emploi. The author, George Perec, seems to be a somewhat odd person who surrounds his writing with all sorts of weird formal rules, and then tries to overcome the difficulties. Jan Söderqvist in Moderna Tider (a Swedish highbrow magazine) compared Perec´s way of writing with a tennis player trying to serve blindfolded, the left arm tied behind his back, the right foot tucked down into a bucket, and the back facing the net. The player holds the ball in his mouth, and the serve is executed by spitting the ball up in the air and hitting it.

I don´t know why, but I came to think of technical writers in this connection. With his back towards the reader, a bucket over his head, hands and feet tied up by SGML, CALS and company standards, and half choked by all the possibilities of the latest computer system the writer tries to produce manuals and instruction books for unsuspecting readers!

So how come I have this unusually bitter attitude? Well, it has been summer. And in the summer the summer machines break down (and in winter the winter machines) and then the instruction book might come in handy. Among things that broke down last summer was the impeller (everybody knows what an impeller is?) in the diesel engine of my fishing boat. To change the impeller (the waterpump wheel actually) is not an easy job. The lid of the pump is fastened by four tiny srews. The space is narrow, dark, and smells of diesel. There is no room for an ordinary socket wrench and you cannot find the ring wrench.

Now an inventor has had the bright idea to replace the small screws with stud screws, threated both ends, on which you can put wingnuts. The idea is good, but the instructions are not! They take the form of a small piece of paper with Swedish on one side and English on the other. The Swedish instruction ends abruptly after a few directives which do not help you to get the things in place. Unless you turn the paper over and switch to English. But there is a mismatch between the languages, and you are stuck.

A very simple test of the instruction leaflet with an ordinary boat owner as test person would have solved the problem. And perhaps also led to a design change that would have eliminated the need for an instruction.

This little story is rather trivial, and also annoying. Problems of this type are not solved by investing in new computer systems and sending people to courses for learning the new system. It´s not the computer, but the operating system that we from birth have got installed between our ears that has to be trimmed and updated, (for instance), by attending conferences and courses where the human user is the main person and real functional testing of information is the natural thing to do. Whether the information is produced with an old mechanical typewriter or the latest version of Framemaker doesn´t really matter.  

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