Chapter 3 Blog

This chapter's reading was about the importance of defining your objectives. One of the guidelines that stuck in my mind was #2," Define Your Usability Goal: Analyze Your Readers' Reading Tasks". According to the text we should design our communication in ways that allow our readers to easily find the information that they need for their purposes. This can easily be done with a table of contents or bold face titles to specific sections in your communication.

Another guideline that I thought interesting was #4," Learn Your Readers Personal Characteristics". In my career I have had several bosses with extremely different personal preferences. One boss never really wanted any of the details. He trusted my work and just wanted to know if a particular task was completed. Another wanted to be updated daily on all of the individual details. Once I learned what each preferred I was able to adjust my communications with them to get the most favorable results.

The last guideline that really stuck out was #7," Ask Others To Help You Understand Your Readers And Their Context". One boss of mine stated." I don't know how you do it but you are able to work well with other departments to get our tasks done". What he didn't know was that I spent time building relationships with coworkers in these other departments. These relationships allowed me to know the best way to write to achieve my objectives.