Every Page is Page One

Mark Baker the live Web seminar Every Page is Page One on Wednesday, 2 October, from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4). Below is a guest post from Mark on the “every page is page one” concept.

Technical communication today takes place in the context of the Web. Your content may not be on the Web, but your readers are. Gerry McGovern suggests that the idea of going online is not obsolete. We don’t go online, we simply are online, all the time. Even if your content is off line, therefore, the reader always has immediate access to the Web and can abandon your content to seek other sources of information on the Web at any moment they wish.

Studies at PARC have shown that people’s information seeking behavior commonly mirrors that of wild animals foraging for food. That is, people adopt strategies that involve the smallest expenditure of energy to find adequate information, evaluating a new piece of content based on the strength of its information scent. Jakob Nielsen argues that ubiquitous access to the Web changes information seeking behavior by making it easier for people to move from one information source to another. This encourages information snacking, where people look for quick bits of information when they need it, in preference to long and deliberate study.

An environment is which readers are constantly moving from one information source to another, taking quick information snacks, is one in which every page is page one. The reader does not follow the path laid out by a single author, from page to page, but hops from one source to another, each new source becoming their new page one. This is the way people read on the Web today, but, because they consume offline content while still being online themselves, it becomes the way they consume all content, or, at least, all the content they consume in support of short term goals and to solve immediate technical problems.

This information snacking behavior is not actually new to the age of the Web. In the experiments that led to the formulation of Minimalism, John Carroll observed the same behavior, related in his book, The Nurnberg Funnel:

Learners also often skip over crucial material if it does not address their current task-oriented concerns or skip around among several manuals, composing their own ersatz instructional procedures on the fly.

One of Carroll’s successful experiments involved replacing the traditional manual with a set of “guided exploration cards” each of which dealt with one task as a whole, and which were intended to be used in any order. And Carroll observed that though the cards were initially presented to the users in a predetermined order, the users quickly started using them out of order as they explored. Every page is page one.

Task based writing has become a significant part of technical communications practice, but while topics are commonly described as being “standalone” information product, in many cases, people are still using topics to build manuals and help systems rather than creating topics that truly work as page one for the reader. In other cases, topics are being designed to maximize their capacity for reuse, rather than for their usability as page one for the reader.

In order to fully serve, and to reclaim the attention of, an audience used to information snacking across the entire Web, technical communicators need to focus on creating topics that work as page one, that is, too write Every Page is Page One topics. To do this, we need an in-depth analysis and study of the Every Page is Page One (EPPO) information design pattern. My webinar, Every Page is Page One, on 2 October, will provide an introduction to the Every Page is Page One information design pattern and the principal characteristics of an Every Page is Page One topic:

  • An EPPO topic is self-contained
  • An EPPO topic has a specific and limited purpose
  • An EPPO topic conforms to a type
  • An EPPO topic establishes its context
  • An EPPO topic assumes the reader is qualified
  • An EPPO topics stays on one level
  • An EPPO topics links richly

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