Tree Swing Cartoon Pictures (early versions)

When people make poor design choices and ignore user feedback, bad and unnecessary things happen

Where I started
I cut my teeth at AT&T and Bell Labs as a technical writer. Back then, Technical Publications was set up a lot like a traditional publishing company. There were Assistant Editors, Senior Editors, Writers, Graphic Artists, even Proofreaders sometimes. You worked your way up to being a writer.

Also, Bell Labs was doing cutting edge research in Human Factors, and helping to define early UX best practices and general usability principles. They had a Human Factors group that worked with documentation and user interface design groups to help them improve.

My writing group had a particularly troublesome huge manual that a writer had done who perhaps didn’t really understand the SMEs involved, and hadn’t defined the users at all…and it needed help. The Bell Labs Human Factors group did an analysis of this tome (it was all about network traffic), and came up with recommendations:

1. There were two or three kinds of users who were at very different levels, and so there should be different sections of the book (the users ranged from managers who ran reports, to traffic engineers who needed access to much more…