The Use of Literature on Web Linguistics and Usability

2007-06-12 22:26 |

Whereas traditional literature on the fields of discourse analysis and text linguistics is – as one would have expected – very much at hand, useful literature (including online papers) on the particular concerns of Web linguistics are rare and ambiguous. Indeed, the topic is widely discussed among a variety of Web sites, but scientific standards, such as giving references or providing the information necessary for citing these publications, are often ignored . Therefore, I only used a few online papers for my discussion on Web linguistics. These however have been derived from reliable sources, as far as I can say.

In need of advanced linguistic discussions on Web content, I mainly relied on the ‘classical’ book medium. However, it was even difficult to find literature focussing upon linguistic questions concerning proper usage of text for Web sites. Agreeing with Wagner (2002) on the state of research mirrored in literature, I realised that even linguistic papers regarding software ergonomics or comparable issues are hard to find – at least in the German speaking area.

Please note, that my concrete research on the findings published here is about three years old – and I hope, the reader doesn’t mind. I may assure that it will be worthwhile to stay tuned to my blog, though. Any newer book recommendations are welcome and shall be reviewed in this category, since nowadays there may be many useful contributions to the topic.

Anyway, books that seem to deal with this topic often try to combine all aspects of Web publishing, as they report about the economic use of the Internet, marketing, Web design, and usability aspects; but they lack in giving linguistic background for their arguments on writing for the Web. So do, for instance, Schmider (2003) and Grede (2003). Also subjective opinions on good and bad authoring often leave questions for empirical evidence or comparable references. This is the difficulty with some books on Web typography and layout, too, as such books sometimes also touch the problems of text production. Other books from that field rather represent a guide to Web developer’s work flows, e.g. Neutzling (2002).

So, due to the scope of my topic, I was not able to consider every contribution to the topic by every author, although there still might be some useful input available in the form of articles and essays, but those are often set in other contexts. In fact, the most discussed issues in linguistics concerning texts on the Internet are ‘conceptional orality’, as it often appears in e.g. chat communication; moreover ‘hypermedial learning’, and ‘online documentation’1. I clearly have to delimit the subject of my blog from those issues, as I will explicitly approach the topic from a linguistic point of view, trying to work in advance for successful (commercial) writing. The reader shall see how this can be realized on the basis of findings from linguistics and usability research, applied to the context of e-commerce. This individual concern is – if at all – rarely reflected in literature up to now.

Few German speaking sources

Generally, English speaking authors dominate the literature on Internet issues. Nevertheless, there are still a few useful books from German speaking authors that I have taken into consideration to build a framework for my concerns. Some appeared along two series that cover a wide range of scientific approaches towards Internet and text production issues. One book out of such a series is Kana et al.’s http://TEXT? from 2003 that was published along with other related titles, for instance http://DESIGN! and http://KONZEPT:. Another useful series for my studies was Jakob & Knorr’s Textproduktion und Medium2. Therein, Handler (2001) and Wagner (2002) provide information on electronic text, text production, and linguistic aspects of man-machine-interaction, although Wagner (2002) is rather concerned with language aspects of software usage. However, both series have been quite new these days and have served scientific needs. The particular volumes I have used handle some of the linguistic aspects relevant for my topic in detail and at the same time stay focused on even those issues. Further reference for some of my arguments can be found in Lackerbauer (2003); another useful Web linguistic outline provides the doctoral thesis of Huber (2003).

Findings from Web usability research beeing the basis for all writing apects

The state of research concerning Web linguistics in the USA is somewhat different, indeed. People got used to working with the Internet some years earlier, and the same accounts for research concerning Internet issues. However, there is no linguistic discussion about writing for the Web without considering those aspects of the online medium that make writing for the Web a special problem. All of the existing discussions therefore are based on findings from usability research.

Jacob Nielsen & Co.

One name that must be mentioned when dealing with Internet usability and writing for the Web is Jakob Nielsen who, in fact, invented the notion of ‘Web usability’. According to several book reviews from the c’t, the Danish-American Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., accounts for “die Koryphäe” of Web development (Becht 2000).

Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and led that company’s Web usability efforts. He worked also at the IBM User Interface Institute, Bell Communications Research, and Technical University of Denmark. Findings from his numerous studies and projects are published in more than ten books written or edited by Nielsen; also he has written more than eighty research papers on usability engineering, user interface design, and hypertext (there may be even more by now). With his colleague Dr. Donald A. Norman, Nielsen co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, providing consulting services, offering usability reviews, training, and user testing. On his personal website he provides a summary of his and others’ findings, and gives a lot of practical recommendations for books related to any aspect of Web development. Him being an expert on his field and due to his wide spread reputation, I used his book recommendations as a starting point for my research on English speaking literature to the topic. Nielsen’s book reviews have allowed me to particularly search for books concerned with Web texts and writing problems on the Web. Therefore, I used several of his books for my discussion, but I found useful contributions by other authors like Kilian (1999), Johnson (2003), or Dillon (1994), too. I also selected several short articles about Web texts from Nielsen’s online column Alertbox, which provides actual and compact information, frequently consulted by several hundred thousand readers.

Ultimately, as e-commerce seldom stops at a country’s frontiers, international aspects of writing for the Web need to be taken into consideration. For that purpose, I also followed Nielsen’s recommendation consulting the book International User Interfaces edited by Del Galdo and Nielsen (1996), and moreover relying on Nielsen’s all-encompassing Designing Web Usability (2000).

I am also aware of the fact, that Nielsen’s work, published in his books and articles, is already several years old (even older than my basic research). In terms of the Internet, the time span from e.g. 2000 until 2007 is an eternity, colloquially spoken. Nevertheless, I will use these findings for the discussion of my topic showing that they still represent valid knowledge for today’s Internet issues.

1 Some complex interactions may require manuals or online help. How to maintain an end-user’s perspective on any instruction and how to use multimedia for self-supporting products has become a field on its own to work at, see e.g. Horton (1994).

2 The particular eight volumes have been published between 1997 and 2004.

Published by Christian Kuhn

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