One of my recent projects is help Mary Ramsey build the Music Lab in Warnock.  And recently we’ve been writing a user guide for the facilities.  To make the guide more clear, quite some pictures need to be included.  Most of them are photos from the digital camera or screenshots with annotation.  However, I needed a clean block diagram as a schemata to explain the conceptual architecture of the configuration to replace a noisy photo.

I went to David for help and it has been quite a mind-opening journey for me.

One of the questions David asked me is “What details are important for the users in this diagram?”  For me, it’s like a Zen question.  The whole point of a diagram is to let users grasp the main idea easily.  However, David also mentions that if we can differentiate each block by using a meaningful icon (as opposed to a blank block with a label), it will help users, too.  Now it becomes a balance that requires some wisdom: we want enough details for the icons to be easily recognizable but not too much less important details to distract users from the main point.

Another interesting point we discussed was which component is important for the users.  The Music Lab provides the facility for users to connect their own headphones and guitar for music recording and production.  I told David that the headphones and the guitar should be in the diagram so users know how to connect them, but when users come into the lab, they won’t actually see the headphones and the guitar.  David suggested we differentiate components that are already there and components that users need to provide with different grey-scaled images.  So I automatically said, “that’s a good idea.  Let’s grey out the headphones and the guitar since they are not actually there.”  Then David said, if our purpose is for the users to quickly see what users need to do, perhaps having the components that users don’t have to change greyed out would be a better idea.

What a lightening moment!  He composes the documents from the users’ point of view and produces the documents that’s really for the users.

Before David left, he asked me: so how big shall the diagram be?  I found myself unable to answer that question.  He humored me: “Not too big, not too small, just the right size, eh?”  I ended up showing him where his picture would fit in the document and let him decide on the size.

I certainly learned quite something from him.