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USER-CENTERED COMMUNICATION
The premise that readers want to answer certain fundamental questions by reading a news story is central to the rhetorical approach in journalism. By asking these questions about any topic before beginning to write, a journalist can discover the necessary information to include in a story. Journalists call this strategy the "five W's" because five questions that begin with the letter "W" form the core of this approach:
1. What were the actions and what happened as a result of the actions?
2. Who performed the actions in the story (or who experienced the results)?
3. Where did the actions take place?
4. When did the actions occur?
5. Why did the actions occur?
Some authors add a sixth question--"how?"--but such questions can generally be rephrased so they are covered by one or more of the W questions; for example, "what permitted this to occur?" can replace "how did it happen?"
The answers to these five questions provide enough information for an audience to understand what happened, and whether and how it will affect them. In short, asking these questions implicitly leads to "user-centered design." Regrettably, this approach no longer seems to be actively pursued by younger journalists; in my experience, stories that answer all five questions, let alone that answer each one satisfactorily and efficiently, are uncommon. Even in otherwise excellent papers that address how to develop documentation (e.g., Scholz 1994), the details of content are discussed more in terms of how to write rather than what to write.
Although the five W's represent an old and familiar approach, they remain relevant; old tools are no less valuable just because they're old. Our increasing emphasis on user-centered information makes the issues of "what happens" (or what must the user cause to happen) and "how will it affect the user" important ones. In this paper, I'll suggest how you can use the five W's approach in the audience analysis phase of designing information to help ensure that your information meets the audience's needs. Editors and documentation managers can use a similar approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a design.
This paper is based on personal experience with documentation that failed to meet my needs, and not on quantitative research on usability. I've provided...