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'''Form and Document Creation''' is one of the things that [[Technical communication|technical communicators]] do as part of creating [[deliverable]]s for their companies or clients. Document design is “the field of theory and practice aimed at creating comprehensible, persuasive and usable functional documents.”<ref>Carel Jansen, “Document Design” (''South African Journal of Linguistics'', 17, no. 4, 1999).</ref> These forms and documents can have many different purposes (i.e. collecting information, providing information, etc).
==Visualization and Visual Communication==
===Significance===
Eva Brumberger, an instructor in the professional writing program at Virginia Tech, surveyed professional writers about the nature of their work in order to evaluate what student writers are taught before entering the work force.<ref>Eva Brumberger, “Visual Communication in the Workplace: A Survey of Practice” (''Technical Communication Quarterly'', 16, no. 4, 2007), 369, 392.</ref> These professional writers confirmed that their role has developed past the [[verbal communication]] dominant in the literature presented to students and has developed into mostly visual communication.<ref>Ibid.Brumberger, 386</ref>
===Definition===
Technical communicators must take data and convert it into information; this process is known as [[Information Visualization|visualization]], or [[visual communication]].<ref name=blythe347>Stuart Blythe, “Readings in Information Visualization” (''Technical Communication Quarterly'', 9, no. 3, 2000), 347.</ref> Because of the widespread use of [[digital media]], modern technical communicators have a lot to think about concerning visualization for digital forms and documents. Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, editors of the book ''Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think'', “define ‘visualization’ as the ‘use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition.’”<ref>Ibid.< name=blythe347/ref> Though many forms and documents will still have a hard paper copy to distribute in offices, most forms and documents are now utilized online in some fashion; this is why there is such focus on the computer-supported representations for maximal cognition. Brumberger defines visual communication as “designing print, Web, and multimedia documents…creating visual displays of information/data, generating other visual material…and any other communication tasks which rely on visual language.”<ref>Brumberger, “Visual Communication,” 373.</ref>
===Examples===
There are many areas where professional writers utilize visualization. Visualization is most useful in the following areas:<ref>Blythe, “Readings,” 348.</ref>
:*complex documents
:*statistical and categorical data
:*histories
Visual communication responsibilities include:<ref name=brumberger387>Brumberger, “Visual Communication,” 387.</ref>
:*designing visual content
:*determining when to use visual material
:*applying templates that already exist to material
Visual communication tasks include designing:<ref>Ibid.< name=brumberger387/ref>
:*[[Document|print documents]]
:*[[page layout]]s
===Human-Centered Design===
[[Human-centered design]] focuses on ensuring that the audience will comprehend the information being presented. It is “how a frustrated and confused subject…comprehends a critical message in a crowded and noisy environment.”<ref>Blythe, “Readings,” 349.</ref> The goal of human-centered design is “to make information accessible” and “to give form to data.”<ref>Ibid.Blythe, 350.</ref>
Luke Wroblewski, senior director of Project Ideation and Design at [[Yahoo!|Yahoo! Inc.]] and author of ''Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks'', also has some human-centered design ideas for web forms and documents.<ref name=wrobelewski18>Luke Wroblewski, “The Information Architecture Behind Good Web Forms” (''Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology'' 34, no. 6, 2008), 18.</ref> He says, “because people want what’s on the other side of a web form, their general tendency is to jump right in, start answering questions and hope to get it done quickly.”<ref>Ibid.< name=wrobelewski18/ref> Thus, he recommends designing a clear path to completion for the form or document. He also mentions “messaging without proper priority, like hard-to-find error messages, and unconnected primary actions can similarly cloud the steps people need to take in order to get through a form.<ref>Ibid.< name=wrobelewski18/ref> Thus, for a web form to have human-centered design, information must be structured “in a logical pattern from start to finish.”<ref>Ibid.Wroblewski, 19.</ref>
==The Structure and Organization==
===Functional Analysis===
In order to design a form or document, the writer should understand and evaluate the different constraints in the rhetorical situation; this is called functional analysis.<ref name=lm387>Leo Lentz and Henk Pander& Maat, “Functional Analysis for Document Design” (''Technical Communication'', 51, no. 3, 2004), 387.</ref> One of the biggest components in analyzing a form or document is to determine the communicative purpose of the form or document.<ref>Ibid.< name=lm387/ref> Leo Lentz and Henk Pander Maat, an associate professor and a senior lecturer at the University of Utrecht, break down communicative purpose into four elements:<ref name=lm388>Ibid.Lentz & Maat, 388.</ref>
:#intended communicative effect: the intended effect should fall into one of three categories; “a cognitive change in the mental state of the reader, who learns something or forms a particular attitude, a change in the reader’s behavior, such as handling a machine or buying a product, or a change in the social reality as a result of the collective behavior of readers, such as the sale of a product.”<ref>Ibid.< name=lm388/ref>
:#topic: this is based on the readers needs, since the reader is the one expected to act on the information.<ref>Ibid.Lentz & Maat, 389.</ref>
:#target group: this should be a specific group described either by demographic variables or communicative predispositions.<ref>Ibid.Lentz & Maat, 390.</ref>
:#organizational goal: this is the change that should occur in every individual reader.<ref>Ibid.Lentz & Maat, 391.</ref>
After analyzing the communicative purpose, the technical communicator can design the form or document in order to match the requirements and meet the expectations for the document.<ref>Ibid.Lentz & Maat, 397.</ref>
===Explicit Structure===
One aspect of form and document creation that technical communicators should pay close attention to is explicit structure. When the structure is explicit, the reader can interact with the form or document on a more effective level.<ref name=farkas9>David K. Farkas, “Explicit Structure in Print and On-Screen Documents” (''Technical Communication Quarterly'', 14, no. 1, 2005), 9.</ref> The technical communicator’s “primary means to make structure explicit is through headings and links.”<ref>Ibid.< name=farkas9/ref> The technical communicator must add these headings when they are drafting the form or document, because the structure will remain implicit until they are added.<ref>Ibid.Farkas, 10</ref>
The authors of “Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Love & Typography” add hierarchy to the idea of making structure explicit. They say, “effective ''hierarchy'' gets people to look where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. Without it the reader is left confused and frustrated. Emphasis can be stressed by size, weight, color, style, and placement.”<ref>“Meet"Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Love & Typography” (''Font Shop'', 2010)", 26.</ref> Thus, emphasis from several different font decisions joins headings as a feature that makes structure explicit.
===Abstract Structure===
Another aspect to consider when designing a form or document is abstract structure. This is the idea that text has a graphical component.<ref name=power211>Richard Power, Nadjetet Bouayad-Agha, and Donia Scott, “Document Structure” (''Computational Linguistics'' 29, noal. 2, 2003), 211.</ref> Text incorporates a graphical component not only because the words are “often accompanied by conventional graphics such as pictures or diagrams, but they themselves form graphical elements such as titles, headings, chapters, sections, captions, paragraphs, and bulleted lists.<ref>Ibid.< name=power211/ref>
When considering abstract structure in planning a form or document, a technical communicator must also look at what Richard Power, Nadjet Bouayad-Agha, and Donia Scott call ''document structure'': “the organization of a document into graphical constituents like sections, paragraphs, sentences, bulleted lists, and figures.”<ref>IbidPower et al., 213.</ref> This document structure also goes hand-in-hand with the human-centered design aspect of visualization as pertaining to form and document creation. Technical communicators should look at their form or document to make sure that the abstract structure of the form or document is helping achieve the overall goal with the reader.
Though it focuses on a visual and graphic effect, abstract structure also focuses on wording.<ref name=power216>IbidPower et al., 216.</ref> The examples that follow are taken verbatim from Power, Bouayad-Agha, and Scott. They show a progression from a passage written by a technical communication novice (a), to an edit by a more experienced technical communicator (b), to an edit by a senior expert technical communicator (c).<ref>Ibid.< name=power216/ref> The successive changes are designed to make the structure and wording valid.
:(a)
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