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Jason Owen

Minimalism Revisited: An Interview with John Carroll - 0 views

intercom.stc.org/...an-interview-with-john-carroll

intercom minimalism carroll knowledgemanagement

shared by Jason Owen on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • people need to act, they need to be engaged
  • they need to struggle
  • The minimalist idea, the way I think of it, is to minimize the extent to which the system and the information get in the way of what the user’s really interested in.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the impulse to end up with Louis XIV, with decoration, and extras, and so forth, is something you always have to struggle against.
  • do like the term “learner.” “User” is passive, to me—you’ve been handed something, use it—whereas I think what people are doing is much more actively a matter of ownership and appropriation and coming to control a new tool in a new environment. And it is a matter of learning. It’s a matter of problem-solving. Besides being cumbersomely long—you could call them “problem-solvers….”
  • eally just a fundamental truth about learning. People need to act. We are, after all, talking about skill learning. We’re not talking about pondering abstract concepts or definitions or conceptual information, declarative information. It’s mostly skill learning and you learn skills by doing.
  • I would say that brevity is more a consequence of minimalism than a principle of minimalism. If you go back to what I was saying earlier about trying to facilitate the learner’s initiative and goals and aspirations and impede them less, you will most likely end up with a briefer design, or it might be layered. I was alluding earlier to David Farkas’s contribution to minimalism in the book Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel which had to do with layered designs. This was a way in his work of getting the information design out of the learner’s way, making the information layered so that it was available on demand, but not necessarily an impediment if the learner didn’t choose to look at it at that time.
  • we realized these people did have goals and they were experts, but they weren’t experts with the Displaywriter or the IBM PC. They were experts in office work, and they knew a lot about work practices, and processes, and objectives, and quality standards, and they knew more than we did. And we came to see that prior knowledge as an important resource that needed to be leveraged in the design of information, the design of training materials, and the design of user interfaces.
  • Jason Owen on 16 May 13
     
    "Minimalism Revisited: An Interview with John Carroll"
Jason Owen

The Web Does Minimalism | Every Page is Page One - 1 views

everypageispageone.com/...the-web-does-minimalism

dita minimalism documentation technicalwriting

shared by Jason Owen on 09 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • is not about less content, it is about the reader spending less time on the content.
  • Jason Owen on 09 Feb 12
     
    A good summary of minimalist content that looks at the Web as a cohesive collection of content. The article also provides an interesting spin on minimalism, saying that minimalist "is not about less content, it is about the reader spending less time on the content. "
Jason Owen

Minimalism Updated 2012 - 1 views

www.infomanagementcenter.com/...feature.htm

minimalism dita technicalwriting documentation

shared by Jason Owen on 05 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Four Principles of Minimalism Principle One—Focus on an action-oriented approach Principle Two—Ensure you understand the users' world Principle Three—Recognize the importance of troubleshooting information Principle Four—Ensure that users can find the information they need
  • Even when individuals seek to understand how a product works, they intend to use that information to accomplish a task. For that reason, information developers provide procedures in documentation. The more effectively these procedures address real tasks that people want to perform, the more successful they are in meeting user needs.
  • Too often, information developers, isolated from understanding their users, try to compensate by explaining the product interface, leaving the user to figure out how to get results alone.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Known as scenario-based or solutions-oriented information, this content speaks to real goals and real work rather than trivial button pushing.
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