Re: online help usability (fwd)

Subject: Re: online help usability (fwd)
From: Andreas Ramos <andreas -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 14:27:43 -0700

On Thu, 7 Apr 1994, Caryn Rizell wrote:
> (...) we must admit that men and women have different ways
> of getting information--women stop and ask for help and men just keep
> going until they find it. Please forgive me for stereotyping, but in
> my own experience this is true.)

> If we haven't already, we should be examining gender-based
> issues for how people use our products. Has this been done?
> (...)
Dear Caryn,
I'm glad you brought this up, because I wouldn't have dared to
say it.

In six or seven years of techsupport and techwriting, I know that there
is a huge difference in explaining something to a man or a woman.
Computers are inherently very male, in that computers are task-oriented,
unforgiving, and challenging in their poverty of information. The best
example is DOS and the command line. Do any of you remember the first
time you saw C:\> ? There is a lot of hidden complexity, simply for its
own charm to programmers and engineers. The very shape of a computer: a
dull grey box, was obviously designed by men: unimaginative, functiional,
impersonal. I look forward to wooden keyboards, veneered monitors, etc,
with something that doesn't look like it fell out of a starship. It is no
coincidence that computering is heavily, if not entirely, dominated by
men: computer science, electronic engineering. It is only recently that
women have begun to major in this field. I was talking to a magazine
editor, who is a woman, and she told me that the editors knew very well
that 80-90% of the readers were men. I was once involved with a computer
magazine; 97.5% of our readers were men.

Deborah Tannen (Ph.D. Linguistics, author of "You Just Don't Understand")
and Carol Gilligan (Ph.D. psychology, author of "In a Different Voice")
present very plausible arguments for the difference in the communicative
strategies of men and women. They argue that men and women start from
different moral assumtions about the world and people, and, while using
the same language and even sometimes the same words, mean very different
things. THis is of course a very debatable field: many readers of this
e-mail will not agree, or will flame me violently. Let me only point out
that "difference feminism", as the field is called, is a serious academic
discipline, with substantive work in sociology, psychology, linguistics,
and philosophy. There are indeed other variants of feminism which disagree
with difference feminism, or even deny its validity, but that is an
argument of plausibility and politics.

There is also reader response theory, which is mostly German (Wolfgang
Iser), and talks about the reader's understanding and perception of the
text. It may surprise most people that there is very little actual
research in this area, despite a 1/2 trillion dollar communications
industry.

I find difference feminism to be very useful as a way of decribing and
organizing the differences in communicative strategies. I would argue that
Windows (and of course the command line interface) are too linear, too
ucommunicative (i'm sure that one could formulate this better, but not in
an e-mail) for the average user, ie. the non-techie. While it is helpful
to disrempt humans into men vs. women, it seems more that some men are
very masculine (in the American sense) and some women are very feminine,
while most are somewhere in between, depending on circumstances, etc.

In an concrete example, I'm writing a text for new users; i'm deliberately
trying to write it differently. First, I'm going to test the manual (yes,
beta-test a manual) by teaching it to classes of women. I'd write down
their reactions and responses to the information. I would try to avoid as
much technical vocabulary as possible; I'd ask the classgroups to identify
such words which they don't understand or are unfamiliar, and then replace
the words with more everyday langauge.

On a last point, I find it important that many technical writers are
women. It would seem that women are more interested in understanding the
other person's point of view, and then trying to communicate with them.
Men would rather simply dictate instructions (think about your
interactions with male managers!)

As Caryn writes, this is a very touchy area. I am very interested in other
people's constructive opinions. I find that everyone who writes will write
for a specific audience; often, it is secretely a particular person (a
friend, a colleague, a S/O). I'll admit that many of my manuals were
written to friends. Some were written for other men, some were written to
women. Do you write for men or women? Do you find it more useful to write
to a man or a woman?

yrs,
andreas
_____________________________________________________________________________
Andreas Ramos, M.A. Heidelberg Sacramento, California


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