tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

User Assistance
With technical communication, we can at best hope to guide users towards
appropriate behavior. This may or may not extend their mental
models, it may or may not anchor a meaningful experience to which
they resort later when they face a similar problem.
This has been a rather bleak turn of events. Given the inertia of uncontrollable
mental models, how do we manage to communicate anything?
Addicted to meaning
The answer lies in a second aspect of meaning itself: Yes, meaning depends
on shifting signs, on contextual codes, and on our erstwhile experiences.
But we are also addicted to meaning in the sense that we desire
and hope for a generally meaningful life. This is the motivational force
behind our questions for meaning: “What does it mean for me?” and
“Why should I care?”
This aspect is easy to recognize in “big” questions for the meaning of
life, but it also permeates small everyday tasks – the kind we address in
technical communication. We want to connect the dots, we want to make
sense, even of the software we use, and it frustrates us to the point of
personal insult when we cannot, because the stupid thing simply won’t
work!
Even in less consequential matters than the correct use of appliances
and software, we go to great lengths to discover meaning in the world
– or to create it as what we believe we know. Misheard lyrics of pop
songs are a harmless, fun example. Jimi Hendrix didn’t seem to make a
lot of sense singing in “Purple Haze”: “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.”
Instead, many people heard: “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” (Look up
“Mondegreen” on Wikipedia for more fun examples.)
Or consider the first well-known version of the Apple logo, the apple
with a bite in it in horizontal colored stripes (see Konnikova). What
does it mean? It’s Adam and Eve in paradise and their quest for knowledge
manifest! Or no: It’s a reference to Isaac Newton sitting beneath
an apple tree and discovering the law of gravity! Or no: It’s a tribute to
Alan Turing, computer science pioneer, who committed suicide by biting
into a cyanide-laced apple! (Turing was gay, hence the rainbow-colored
stripes).
The point is that one explanation after another is as meaningful as any
urban legend can hope to be – but they are all not the meaning that was
originally intended. The truth is a lot more mundane: The apple is the
company’s namesake. The rainbow denotes color in general, because the
Apple II was the first home computer to display color images. And the
bite was added to indicate scale, so people didn’t confuse the fruit with a
cherry. Or so says Rob Janoff, the logo’s designer (see Creativebits.org).
So we are addicted to meaning. We seek to connect the dots in any plausible
way to come up with a meaning and a solution. But when things
get weird, technical communication often fail to deliver a satisfying answer.
Our formulation of the problem doesn’t match any of the answers
which the manual provides.
Then we turn away from the manual – but our quest for meaning is
not finished yet. We tap other resources: We ask a friend who may not
have the answer, either. But compared to the documentation, a friend is
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