Yappa Ding Ding

The Social Network is a very good movie. The Social Network is an especially interesting movie in that everyone seems to have come away with a different take on the Zuckerberg character. Many see him as a heartless nerd, but I thought he came off very sympathetically. He was driven to create something great, and his success was due to a single-minded commitment to his vision.

That vision was world-changing. Prior to Facebook, the paradigm for online communicaton was email. Email was based on the old business memo. Zuckerberg saw a different way for the world to connect. The reason he was able to succeed so amazingly (unlike many other social network products that fizzled) seems to be an early decision he made to let the users of Facebook determine what it would be, and then to provide the very highest quality for those features.

Thanks to Facebook, the paradigm of communication has changed. Instead of issuing memos we communicate in social networks, with our picture next to our writing and a mixture of broadcast and address. Many children use Facebook as their primary form of online communication. Who knows where it will go next.

Facebook isn't the whole story, of course. There's Twitter and texting and other variations. When historians look back at this period, they will be able to chart the rapid evolution of communication in these still-early years of the wired world. What we do now is nothing like what we will do in ten years.

There is also an evolution in how software products get created. So many of the most successful companies are newly formed, youth-run companies because the staid old companies don't seem to be able to evolve. Successful business is moving towards a much more customer-driven model, which is what Zuckerberg created as an intuitive, naive 19 year old who hadn't been taught how to "properly" develop software. Old businesses try to move towards the new model by adding customer usabilty to their development process, but that's like putting a bandaid on a broken leg.

The fact that Zuckerberg's first social network was a university site to rate the hotness of girls is not a minor point. He developed something that he thought was cool and that he thought other people would find cool, and then he tossed it into the sea and let other people pick it up. He then swam beside them, altering it according to their use of it. You couldn't do this so easily with a product that has to be released, but part of the new business model is creating a product that is fluid and adaptive. It may be why cloud computing or something in that direction is the necessary evolution of software. Downloads and upgrades and new feature lists are all so cumbersome and annoying. In five years we may look back on them as dreadfully archaic, like typewriters.

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As a technical writer, I am constantly thinking about how to help readers absorb and retain information. It's not enough for my documentation to be correct and complete; it has to be useful to readers in that it results in a more effective user experience. So the metric of quality for software documentation is how well users can use the software (in full realization that nobody likes to read the documentation and will consult it as little as possible). That means that I have to be very creative when creating help.

Re the above video, it's exciting to see someone who got creative about statistical reporting with such success. They have not only created more sophisticated analysis and a zippier view (using a Google gadget called motion charts), but he has turned a statistical lecture into storytelling.

I have long believed in the importance of an emotional element to help people absorb and retain information. I once read an abstract of a PhD thesis in technical writing that found people retain information better if it makes them happy - but I suspect happiness is just a subset of emotions that will achieve the same end. I recently saw a lecture (I've lost the link, unfortunately, but it was on TED) about how graphics engage different parts of the brain and get people to make connections that words alone cannot make.

Seeing this brilliant statistical presentation approach reinforces something I've thought for a long time: documentation should have graphics: cartoons and photos as well as UML diagrams and screenshots. As an example, I have an old copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Java 2, and it includes a repeated cartoon of a woman yelling out, "Hey stupid!" with a caption underneath that gives a little bit of info about Java. More than once I have flipped through the book reading all the "Hey stupid"s with rapt attention.

On one hand the field of technical writing is prone to a lot of gimmicky ideas and useless bells-and-whistles. On the other, it is held back by localization concerns: many cultures are said to object to representations of humans (even of hands), and Germans are said not to appreciate humor in business, and generally we are warned not to try anything funny in case it offends someone. Nevertheless, I think graphics are integral to engaging readers and should be considered more seriously as core elements of good documentation.

I specialize in documentation for developers, and mostly write reference material, tutorials, and very dense user guides. My books are not read cover to cover, but are generally read piecemeal as the developer needs the info. So not just any graphics will do: like Hans Rosling's statistical presentation software, above, we need to develop really effective, engaging graphics. Graphics that not just provide useful information, but that engage the mind in a novel way.

For more on the new approach to presenting statistics, and lots more examples of it, see gapminder.org.

Update: The lecture I was thinking of is Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning. The comments provide some needed caveats.

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I'm a writer, and I am currently working on a book in Microsoft Word 2007. I have authored in XML, HTML, FrameMaker, PageMaker, Quark XPress, RoboHelp, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, TROFF, NROFF, Script, TeX... and earlier versions of Word. But I have never encountered an authoring tool that sucks as bad as Word 2007.

It is incredibly buggy. Some days I feel like I'm wrestling with a giant squid that is wrapping its tentacles around me sucking me down and as I valiantly hack off its arms they grow back, their destructive suckers adhering to my carefully chosen words and formatting and distorting, maiming, killing...

The really evil thing is that Word has the ability to learn. That is, it learns to stop destroying my doc in one way and then learns to destroy it in a new way.

For a while it did this: Whenever I formatted a paragraph, Word applied the formatting to every paragraph in my book. If I made a paragraph a bullet, every paragraph became a bullet. Then I would press Ctrl-Z to undo and Word would roll back the changes to all paragraphs but the one I wanted to change. This went on for a month or so, then it stopped.

Now it is targeting my internal cross-references. I created hyperlinks to headings within my book. A link will all of a sudden be corrupted in the most pernicious way. Several weeks ago I cut and pasted a section of text by highlighting it and pressing Ctrl-X. Although I have put thousands of things on my clipboard since then, Word remembers that section of text and it inserts it into the middle of a hyperlink. It does it to links that I haven't even changed recently. The phantom text just appears. I created headers for my chapters, and Word particularly likes to insert the phantom text into the headers of certain pages in a chapter. At first it was extremely difficult to delete the phantom text. Then the monster "learned" that I wanted to delete it and made it possible to do so, but it keeps inserting the text!

I also own a copy of Acrobat and I use it to create PDFs. I'm not sure whether it's Acrobat or Word that is the culprit, but again inexplicable bugs are cropping up. Like links are getting produced with internal numbering revealed.

I work responsibly. I pay for licensed copies of software. I put up with the chaos of automatic updates in order to get bug fixes in a timely manner. I read the Word forums to keep up with the experts on best practices.

I can always find a workaround. It takes time and it's annoying, but I can find a way to produce a decent book even with the insane bugs. But why oh why is Word so buggy? Why can't the world's largest software company make its flagship office product work reliably? Why does the new Word interface emphasize little-used bells and whistles and make key functionality more difficult to use? Why oh why???

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With Microsoft saying it will stop selling XP in June (which may or may not be true), there's been a lot of talk recently about the superiority of XP over Vista and the reluctance many have to move to Vista. There have been petitions and threats of law suits.

I suspect that those creating a lot of the hoopla do not recall the early history of XP. Early adopters found XP to be a disaster. Then the first service pack came out and created even more problems. Finally, with SP2, XP became a decent OS.

I have two computers, one running XP and one running Vista. Both have Office 2007. My main problem with Vista is performance-related. I have a powerful, fast computer that I purchased with Vista installed. It is not overly full and I defrag it on a schedule every week, but it can be reduced to a crawl by using Windows Media Center and Word at the same time. Or maybe the problem is some phantom process that's running in the background. Whatever is causing it, it's a pain.

I'm very iffy on the new face of Office 2007. Why the heck did they get rid of automagical typing? Now when I type an address in Outlook, I have to click on the suggested name. Bill Gates says his goal is an OS that requires less clicking, but Office 2007 requires way more clicking than ever before.

The problem with Word 2007 is that in trying to make it simpler and easier they've made it way more difficult. Loads of arcane actions are front and center, while common actions are buried. Try and insert an en or em dash without the shortcut key; sheesh. It's easier to see how to insert a histogram in a table than how to insert a row. The biggest issue, though, is customizability. For anyone writing substantive documents, Word is not designed to be used "as is" - even Microsoft documentation tells you this. But now the style sheets and properties are buried, and the customization process is bizarre.

Vista's first service pack is coming out soon, and with luck it will solve the performance problems of Vista and introduce fewer new problems than XP's SP1 did. On the new look and feel, I fear we're stuck with them, at least for now.

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