Less Words, More Meaning

When I was a kid, the technologies I saw every day were things like rotary dial phones, small black and white televisions, and shelves full of books. Things have changed a bit - today I have a cell phone that takes photos and video; TV's have grown as big as a wall, and books have been partially replaced by the Internet. 

What's interesting about newer technologies and newer lifestyles is the prevalent use of imagery. My cell phone creates and displays images, and images are an important component in its user interface. Televisions are everywhere, and the advertisements on them are more image-intensive than ever. Some of the information that we formerly found in books is now found on the Internet, an image-intensive environment. One thing is certain, the prevalent use of imagery is not going away anytime soon, so competency in its use is a must-have for technical communicators.

To evaluate the effective use of imagery in designing communications, I decided to focus my thoughts on the use of two particular types, and icons and illustrations, particularly data visualizations. The overused cliché says that a picture is worth a thousand words, or maybe 60,000 according Dr. Lynell Burmark. 

ICONS

In the case of icons, instructional meaning can be imparted in an instant, providing graphical instruction for viewers. One example is the use of icons in computer interfaces (shown below), another is the use of icons in web navigation.

In either case, the purpose of the icon is to inform the user on how to take action using a graphic to provide the instruction. Icons can be quite effective in enhancing usability . . . or not, as you can see in this screencast, where I review the use of navigational icons used on a business directory website, http://www.logonav.com/:

ICON-ILLUSTRATION HYBRID

Now navlog.com uses icons in their simplest form, and icons themselves are examples of relatively simple images with simple visual messages. Illustrations, however, can be used to convey even more meaning, depending on their sophistication in any number of properties. I found one example, however, where illustrations were used in a creative way to provide a dual function. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute video lecture that explains the ecology of a materials economy. Illustrations are used on its website as elements of visual rhetoric that support the goals of the lecture and as icons that inform the user how to use the site and learn more about the subject, such as in the instance below:

I encourage you to go to the site, watch the 1^st couple of minutes and click on the illustrations to see how they also function as icons. I thought this application was really creative, useful, and effective. Did the graphics replace words in this application? I’m not so sure, but the certainly ADDED meaning in this instance. By the way, I am not necessarily endorsing all of the content in the video, but if you’ve got the time, it is a thought-provoking piece.

DATA VISUALIZATION

If iconic images are elementary in form and meaning, illustrations can transfer the meaning of complex ideas more quickly that many, many words. One genre of illustration is data visualization, which I referred to briefly in my September 13 post. In this form, large amounts of data can be evaluated visually, a process that far quicker, and certainly more interesting, than a textural description of the same information. In my earlier post, I referenced this animated visualization of a decade of U.S. trade deficits. How many words do you suppose that illustration replaced? 

One excellent data visualization is this one, posted at Axxis.org, on web browser market share over time. The center ring is the earliest, and shows the use of early versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape and AOL. The outer and latest rings include the market share of Safari, Opera, and Firefox, as well as the ubiquitous Microsoft browsers. There is a lot of information here that is instantly accessed . . .  I only had to read the key – there are no instructions on the graphic – to be able to write this description of the data.

Perhaps the ultimate data visualization project is Google Earth – how many words would it take to describe all of the features of the surface of the Earth? Using Google Earth, you can see your are of interest in seconds, and understand something about that area quickly by looking at the visual images presented.

Images convey meaning, and their effective use can communicate meaning far faster than words and text. So if effective use of imagery is the key to great communications, is bad imagery the fastest way to ruin your message? That’s an idea I don’t think we want to learn the hard way.

Data of the People, By the People, For the People

So maybe I am a day late and a dollar short, but I recently started an account with the online bookmarking service, Delicious. A latecomer to Web 2.0, I started the account because of the difficulty I experienced managing the many bookmarks in my browser. You can see my Delicious account here. If you look on the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see the number of tags that I have entered to date. "What are tags?” I'm glad you asked.

In Web 2.0 and other computer applications, tags consist of keywords assigned to a data file that describe the corresponding file content. Tags are a form of metadata that is useful when searching across a database. These data artifacts are used in a variety of applications; for instance, I am creating this blog entry in MS Word, and have assigned metadata to this file (which I viewed by clicking “File”, then “Properties”). It looks like this:

In this graphic, you can see some of the metadata is assigned to this file, which may become useful if I need to find this piece at a latter date. In this instance, the keywords identify the content. While I don’t often use this function because my database is small, it provides utility to a company involved in identifying and managing content across one or more organizations. The result is that specific tags can be searched within a database to facilitate retrieval of similar content. Doing so requires that the tags be organized in a way that allows them to be easily found.

Organizing systems of information can be approached in various ways. One source I read cited the Dewey Decimal System as a familiar system for establishing a hierarchy for the information contained within your local library. In the biological sciences, taxonomy of the known species of flora and fauna organizes our knowledge of the plant and animal kingdoms. In the same way, tags placed as metadata on database files can be used to classify and organize the files in a database. By the way, clicking on the tree in the link below gives rise to specific instances of biological classification – go to this link and click on the frog, for instance . . . the Tree of Life is an interesting Data Visualization.

Web 2.0 applications similarly use databases to organize tags, but their use figures more prominently in the functionality of the site. Hierarchy is established by folksonomy, where increased the frequency of tag use by the viewer community elevates the tag in site’s tag hierarchy. This can make for some other interesting data visualizations – Delicious has established a tag folksonomy for my personal account, which uses text color and relative size in a Tag Cloud to denote my most frequent tags. It looks like this:

Delicious’ site-wide tag cloud, as of the wee hours of October 21, 2009, looked like this:

Looking at this tag cloud, it’s easy to see that “design”, “blog”, “video”, and “software” are the most frequent terms used in tags by the Delicious community. This hierarchy is established by data the user’s entered, and implies that that these are the topics that Delicious users are seeking on the Internet. It’s a pretty solid statement about what is important to people. It is data of the people, by the people, for the people.

These hierarchies are not without imperfections. Anything derived from the actions of people is subject to human error – such as when I was looking for information on wrench design and entered the term twiting force instead of twisting force – see my personal tag cloud above.  As such, errors can be incorporated in the database, although this one should get buried at the bottom of the tag cloud pile, unless every other web-surfing mechanic is as bad a typist as I. This illustrates another Web 2.0 principle - the applications get better with increased use. As other tags are elevated in the hierarchy, the impact of my error will become essentially nil.

Other problems occur in folksonomies.  One of them has to do with the idiosyncrasies of the language used for tagging.  In English, we have synonyms. When I searched on lemon, two date-ordered bookmarks that came up had to do with automotive defects and lemonade, two results that are clearly unrelated. 

Searching on bush included items about the former U.S. presidents and a development project with bush in the title, but nothing about plants. See below:

So people aren’t perfect and neither is our language. Other aspects that make folksonomies less than perfect are discussed in this interesting paper by Adam Mathes. But the imperfections do not negate the power of folksonomies – knowing what your audience is thinking can be an important and powerful tool.

In business, reviewing a folksonomy against a firm’s own marketing goals could increase its success. For example, a software giant ready to introduce its Next Big Program could review a folksonomy on its site and find the most common searches are crash, corrupt and security patch. These descriptors could be indicative of the desired qualities for new products as well as an existing quality and public relations problem. A chain of auto repair stores that pushes brake and oil change services can review a car repair site and find “check engine light” and “state inspection” are the most popular tags assigned by site users. How might that inform their marketing plans going forward? A political organization could use folksonomies to gauge the interests of the public. Opening a tag cloud is a whole lot easier than accessing and reviewing website logs on user habits, and is more meaningful because the data and language are input by the collective usership.

So Delicious got me thinking about folksonomies and audience analysis, which resulted in the piece you are reading.  Good technical communication is all about accurate audience analysis. Folksonomies offer a feedback mechanism like no other - Data of the People, By the People, For the People. And imperfect or not, I cannot think of a more direct method for gauging audience interests, a key to creating A Better Message.