By Sarah E. Velasquez | Student Member and Tara S. Urban
Intricate websites called complex and complicated information systems (CCISs) present a huge challenge to technical communicators. CCISs draw from multiple sources for their information, requiring the technical communicator who works with them to think about multiple types of content and delivery. Although we don't expect technical communicators to be Web designers or technical support, we see a need for technical communicators to have general knowledge of how CCISs function to be able to work with the content of these systems. In the rest of this article we will explain these information systems in more detail and then suggest how technical communicators should use their skills to work with CCIS content.
What Are Complex and Complicated Information Systems?
In Combining Rhetorical Theory with Usability to Evaluate Quality of Writing in Web-Based Texts, Dr. David Hailey defines CCISs as websites that are so complicated that they can only be managed by computers. These systems are overseen by people, but their operation is managed by computers because they handle information from too many sources for humans to manage alone. To be a CCIS, websites have to meet several criteria. Attributes such as accessing external file sources and outside systems; being reactive, situational, and dynamic; and performing customer specific tasks are required for a site to be classified as a CCIS.
Driven by External Files
The basic explanation of a CCIS is that it relies on the ability to connect and be driven by external files, RSS feeds, databases, and other websites. A CCIS works first by an inquiry from an external source. For example, a human or another computer visits a website and requests information about a certain topic. The CCIS then responds by reaching beyond its internal files and servers to access outside information. This information source can be anything from a database to another website. The resulting problem is that the content from these external sources is not under the control of the people who created the CCIS.
Additionally, there are opportunities for automation of CCISs. Preprogrammed scripts can be set to run when certain scenarios are triggered by a user. JavaScript might also be used to update the page periodically. For example, automatic cycling can be programmed so that sites like CNN.com can update the news, weather, and stock market report at regular time intervals to avoid the need for human intervention.
There are limitations when dealing with CCISs. For one, the more information requested the trickier it is to gather all the information together to create a meaningful final product. Even a single component of the system can be hard to examine because much of the information does not exist in the final format until it has been delivered to the user's computer. This can complicate the process, because if the system is not structured properly it won't gather the information requested correctly, resulting in pieced-together content that isn't organized or meaningful.
Reactive and Dynamic
A CCIS must also be reactive and dynamic. To suggest that the CCIS knows where all information is at all times would make it cumbersome and slow. The CCIS does not remember where everything is, nor does it store all its information in one place. It must be able to react to different scenarios in different ways and respond to each situation individually. Information is accessed in a different way every time, meaning it can move along different paths. If information is requested from a user, the information is retrieved along a certain path. If a different user requests the same information, an alternate path might be used. This is necessary for many reasons, one of which is that websites and data are not static but dynamic and forever changing.
Because websites are dynamic, CCISs need to be dynamic, also. By dynamic, we mean their responses must be nonlinear and able to change and adapt according to location changes of source information. Information may also be requested by different media, such as cellular phone, Web, and computer, which requires the system to access the same information in a different way, suggesting that a different path be used. In all of these scenarios, the technical communicator needs to make sure that the content is meaningful and makes sense for the situation and user.
Capable of Recognizing Users
One of the features of CCISs that people are often exposed to is user recognition and customization. Much like Amazon.com, CCISs are able to “remember” users and preferences via cookies. These cookies are often used for sites like Amazon.com to provide customized home pages and information from other sources that apply to the user. The result of this feature is that CCISs maintain a reader history and responds to individual users differently every time they visit the site, depending on the information that the user views, accesses, and saves. User recognition is yet another characteristic of CCISs that makes control over the content on these websites challenging. Underlying all of these complexities is the problem that the content often goes completely unexamined by the provider. While the content might be appropriate, it also might not be, and nobody may be checking either way.
How Should Technical Communicators Approach CCISs?
Don't Leave the Content to the Programmers
Now that we understand some of the characteristics of CCISs, we can see that these sites are very technically complicated and require programmers and other IT professionals to create and maintain them. However, their expertise and focus is on the coding that goes into these sites, not the content. Because CCISs pull pieces and parts from different files and databases, keeping the content current and relevant becomes a real challenge. The question then becomes, who is responsible for content control and quality as more sites and databases are involved? The logical answer to this question is the technical communicator, who has the tools to evaluate content that a programmer doesn't possess. Programmers may not be paying attention to this aspect of a CCIS. Without a technical communicator it is easy for the content to slip through the cracks. In discussing CCISs, Hailey states that “[i]n the face of such complexities, IT professionals and technical communicators have developed increasingly sophisticated metrics for evaluating quality in navigation, structure, and content.” But he also goes on to say that, “there seems to be no good system for simultaneously evaluating relevance and rhetorical quality of the content.” This task falls to technical communicators, who will best understand how to analyze the exigency, purpose, and audience of the different components of a CCIS to ensure quality content.
Content Evaluation
Before addressing content in CCISs specifically, we need to recognize that technical communicators can all struggle with evaluating digital content, even on simple Web pages. The typical ways that websites are evaluated, such as usability studies, Web analytics, and search engine optimization, will not necessarily detect deficiencies in content. However, technical communicators, with their understanding of rhetoric, can use their skills to focus on the content, word choice, and whether these words fulfill their purpose, as determined by a rhetorical analysis.
A rhetorical analysis begins with exigency. All websites are created because of a need. Does the website creator have too much inventory on hand, or do they have an art exhibit that no one is attending? Understanding the need is the foundation of website analysis because no purpose or audience can properly be determined without knowing the underlying reason for the site. Once the need of a site is determined, the technical communicator can then examine purpose and audience.
The purpose of a website is to address the creator's need by providing an outlet for his or her information. For example, the exigency of the Turner Broadcasting Network is to be the leader in providing news information to the public. The purpose of the website for their well-known news channel, CNN.com, is to provide the most current breaking news information. The purpose defines what the page is designed to do and is the reason a person will want to visit a site. Because of that purpose, technical communicators can consider what audiences will be reached and then tailor the content for those audiences.
After determining the purpose, we can identify the audiences. There may be many different audiences for a website, and each requires different content to persuade them to do what the site creator intends. Each page of a website might have a different audience and purpose. Further, there may be audiences that the site creator never imagined would visit but should be accommodated. Determining the purpose and audience and then focusing the content to those purposes and audiences will help the audiences identify which pages are intended for them and will tend to persuade the audience to the purpose of the page.
Although it may not be commonly recognized, all websites are trying to persuade users to take some sort of action (called “conversion”) or leave the site with information that they did not possess previous to their exposure. If the desired action of visiting the page is having the user click on a certain link, by evaluating the page, the technical communicator can quickly see if the content is or is not working. In this context, a good approach to evaluating a Web page is to follow these steps:
- Identify why the page needs to be made.
- Identify what the page is supposed to do.
- Identify the audience(s) the page is supposed to impact.
- Evaluate the extent to which the page meets that need and purpose with each audience.
- Justify the evaluation to others if necessary.
These steps generally lead to an excellent sense of how well the content on the page is written.
How Does This Apply to CCISs?
A technical communicator can take the rhetorical analysis just described for simple sites and apply it for CCISs on a page-by-page or even item-by-item basis. But, you may ask, if the programmers create the websites and the technical communicators can help create or evaluate the content, why do the technical communicators really need to have a more in-depth understanding of CCISs, as we are suggesting? In short, technical communicators need to be aware of the complexities of CCISs to be able to perform their rhetorical analyses within this framework. As Hailey says, “If you understand how cars work, you become a safer driver and have a better sense of how to maintain your car. You don't have to replace your oil and filters to know that you were not fairly treated.” A technical communicator has to understand the basics of CCISs in order to talk intelligently about the problems with the content and be able to relate to the programmers and developers. Understanding the challenges, such as not being able to change the way a piece of information is presented because it is being pulled from a database that is owned and managed by a different company, will allow the technical communicator's content analysis to be much more successful, therefore resulting in better organization and wording of content.
We suggest that the technical communicator perform the analysis described previously for each page of a CCIS. By working with programmers to see what parts of a page are dynamic or are being pulled from external sources, the technical communicator can suggest how to write content that is under the site creator's control to best frame the parts that are being pulled in from elsewhere or that may change based on time of day or user. With a good understanding of the exigency, purpose, audience, and rhetoric, the technical communicator will be able to identify content that is not relevant in a CCIS and suggest ways to improve it.
Conclusion
Technical communicators have the skills to evaluate digital content that programmers and developers do not possess. As more and more websites continue to evolve, taking on the form of CCISs, controlling and evaluating the content will become a greater challenge. CCISs is where Web design is headed, so technical communicators need to get on board in trying to understand how these sites are constructed and refining effective ways of evaluating the content to make sure it is good. There are a number of good reasons technical communicators should know how CCISs work and how to evaluate content in them, but perhaps the best is that the technical communicator who can evaluate texts in CCISs becomes indispensible in the web based world.
Sarah E. Velasquez (sevelasquez@hotmail.com) is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a Master's of Science in English, technical writing specialization. She is a grant coordinator for a Midwestern university in Kansas. She belongs to the Kansas City STC chapter.
Tara S. Urban is a student at Utah State University working on her Master's of Science in English, technical writing specialization. She has eight years of experience as a technical editor in the scientific publishing industry.
