Paper Versus Electronic Documents

Like everyone else, I have been, over the past 10 years, faced with the choice between using paper and using electronic documents. Caroline Jarrett's article below focuses on forms, but other documents pose the same choice. Because I travel a lot with my laptop, and hooking up to a printer is a dicey proposition on the road, I have trained myself to rely on electronic documents and avoid paper as much as possible. Here are some of the issues I've found:

• Vision. I'm a very visually-orientated person. If I don't see it, I don't understand it. Electronic documents are harder to see all at once than printed ones, which you can spread out on a desk and skim over easily. The technologies for scrolling, including connection and graphics speed and screen resolution, have all gotten better in the last few years. Even the size of laptop screens are much larger, making the visual scanning of documents easier.
  
  Changing from paper to electronic documents is mainly, I think, a matter of habit. I have simply committed to the electronic format. The more I refuse to revert to paper and practice viewing electronic forms, the better I "see" them.

• Re-use of Information. The biggest benefit of electronic documents, in my opinion, is that it's easy to copy and paste information from one electronic document to another. This is much faster than printing and underlining a paper document, then copying sections of the paper document onto more paper or into a computer. Reusing information is more and more important to productivity.

• Printing Time. Printers are a lot faster now than 10 years ago, but they are still slow. It takes time to print stuff. Sure, you can multi-task while a document prints, but you often have to stop that to load more paper, or correct jams and misalignments.

• Ease of Dissemination/Collaboration. It's hard to email a printed document! Yes, you can fax it, but you still end up with a low-res printed document that has to be re-keyed into a computer. Electronic documents can be emailed, and often, edited online using things like Word's Track Changes feature that allows multiple reviewers to add comments and changes to documents. Wiki technology is the ultimate expression of this collaborative trend.

• But I Want My Printed Copy; I Don't feel Safe Without It. Ever heard of redundant back-ups and off-site archiving? I always make at least two backup copies of any document I create. These are stored locally--usually one backup on my hard drive, one on an external hard drive. So, I have the original and two copies locally. What if I have a fire? That's why I also keep an extra copy of important files offsite. I use a service called WebFiles by www.ProjectStory.com . It makes uploading important files simple to do. There are many other similar services. Remember, almost anything you say about electronic documents applies to paper too--you can lose paper; it can burn up. David Orr

Caroline's Corner - Why People persist with using Paper FormsSource: UN, 7 September 2006 by Caroline Jarrett

Have you ever wondered why your shiny new online form isn't getting the use it deserves, and the boring old paper still keeps poring in? This month, I've been mostly thinking about tax forms - and tax forms on paper. It's something that I do from time to time. Now, I do truly understand that not everyone likes thinking about tax forms, paper or otherwise - and in the UK, most people have their tax dealt with by their employers and don't have much to do with tax forms. But this is an international column and I've been having an international month. And there are some insights here that I think may apply to forms in general.

I have been doing a bit of digging into the statistics. In the USA, pretty much everyone has to do a tax return and by 28th April 2006, the IRS had received about 38M of them from people who don't use a paid preparer - only 21M electronically. That's about 55%. In Australia, pretty much everyone has to do a tax return and the most recent statistics I could find said that about 2.9M Australians do their own tax, about 1M electronically. That's about 34%. In both countries, electronic filing has been around for quite a while, isn't excessively difficult, and has the advantage for most people that they get a quicker refund. And it led me to wondering: why do people persist with paper forms? More......
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3385.asp

Reframing Issues and Projects

As an instructional designer, I am often called in by clients because they have a "training" requirement. As we talk to them and they explain the problem/challenge that has led to this need, it becomes clear that much more than a training intervention is needed. For example, at one travel company they were getting a lot of telephone orders bounced for technical reasons and many of their best customers were complaining about the call center service. As we did research, it was clear that the incentives program, based on the number of calls handled in a day, encouraged call center people to hang up on good customers, who often had complicated orders that would take a long time to handle. There was a kind of top-down disrespect for the call-center agents, no recognition for good work, no attention paid to their opinions. And, yes, there was a training issue on product and system knowledge.

To work with this company, we had to reframe the issues in a larger context of culture change and empowerment. The disrespect had to go; the supervisory employees had to be empowered to help form the correct kind of training; and the incentive program had to be changed. Here's another example of reframing:

The Process of Defining the Problem 09.06.2006 by LukeW

Following the Defining the Problem series on Functioning Form, several designers asked how they should go about reframing problems with clients. How could they shift the conversation from an analysis of specific solutions to a broader discussion that better defined the problem they were trying to solve? Perhaps the best way to illustrate such a process is with an example. More....http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?394

Lesson: Writing a Procedure

Procedure writing is essential to every business. Business process procedures and computer software operating procedures are the most typical ones that need documenting. Without procedures people do things wrong and often re-invent the wheel, creating extra work and duplication of effort.

A few years ago I taught a course on software documentation at the Purdue University Calumet Campus. One lesson was on writing good procedures. There were related topics in the lesson on using style sheets and copy editing. If good procedure writing is important to you, check out the lesson available in this link: http://www.orrnet.biz/TW_Course_Links.htm

Podcamp Boston Uses Wiki to Publish Conference Information.

As a follow-up to an earlier article, here's an article on an interesting business application for wiki technology:

Source: Dennis D. McDonald's Technology Digest; 9/3/2006; 9:11:16 AM.Podcamp Boston Uses Wiki to Publish Conference Information.
Chris Brogan, with whom I've spoken in the past about the use of wikis for collaboratively creaing and sharing corporate documentation, emailed me about the Podcamp Boston website, built and maintained using PBWiki.
While this is certainly not the first time someone has used a wiki to manage conference related information, Chris' example is a good way to show how flexible and easy to use such tools are. Check it out.
Good luck with the conference, Chris!