Comment: Finding the Hidden Interest in Detail

'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

That, as over 500,000 people in the UK now know, is the punch line of the opening joke in a very funny book about punctuation. This is another of those quirky-idea-makes-good stories, perfectly timed to run on the heels of the movie "Calendar Girls" (about how a rural women's group calendar became and international sensation). This small book had an original press run of 15,000 copies. Then it shot up to #1 on amazon.co.uk and stayed there for months.

A usability professional walks into a bookstore. She asks for a copy of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"*. The clerk looks it up on the computer, frowns and says 'I found something, but I don't think it's what you want... it's about punctuation.'

I could not put the book down. I giggled all the way through it, boring my husband with choice tidbits. It was only afterwards that I realised something amazing had happened. I'd actually learned something about punctuation. I've been a poster child for the campaign for full employment for copy editors, treating punctuation like I was writing a modem control string, using commas for pauses (and dashes for long pauses). With this sordid history, it was a little surprising to find myself expounding on the use of the Oxford serial comma over dinner.

But what does this have to do with usability?

I found myself thinking about "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" as a model for good communication, and a metaphor for how to make a 'boring' subject engaging. It's easy to focus on hard metrics like time-on-task and ROI as we make the case for usability, but that's not all there is to usability.

We know that understanding the entire context of use is important. Personas help us paint a portrait of a whole person, seeing users as more than just 'hands on a keyboard'. Don Norman's latest book, "Emotional Design" points out that there is a connection between how much we can connect with something emotionally and how much we like it. Products that are visually pleasing seem easier to use. It will surely not be news to instructional designers and trainers that having fun with learning makes the lessons go down more effectively. I've even been caught talking about how good stories make information more memorable.

Maybe there's a lesson here: if we communicate more engagingly, make our deliverables focus on what's really important and think about our audience, maybe more colleagues will smile when they see us coming.

We can't all write as well as Lynn Truss, and not every usability report or design deliverable we create will be a perfect gem. But it's a standard to aspire to.

Whitney Quesenbery
WQusability

* Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Profile Books, 2003. 228 pages, hardcover. ISBN: 1-86197-612-7.

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