Angela Colter podcast interview: testing content, low literacy & continuous improvement

Summary: In Episode 7 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Angela Colter about testing content, considering users with low literacy skills, and continuous improvement. Check out Angela's blog and publications and follow her on twitter @angelacolter. Listen to the podcast Download MP3 file or subscribe in iTunes. Read the transcript Jonathan Kahn: I'm talking to Angela Colter, who's joining me from Philadelphia today. She's a user researcher and usability consultant, and she's been designing information for people, both online and in print, since 1997. Angela's Principal of Design Research at Electronic Ink in Philadelphia, and she's presented worldwide at conferences like UPA, Confab, STC, IA Summit, and the Plain Language Association. So, Angela, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today. Angela Colter: My pleasure. Jonathan: According to your website, you've been working in information design since '97, originally as a print designer. So what I want to know is, how did you end up in the usability field, and how did that lead you to content? Angela: So I started working as a graphic designer after I finished my master's degree at a college outside of Baltimore, Maryland. And what I found was that, while I was doing print design work, I found that, in many cases, I felt like the clients, the internal folks at the college that I was doing work for, were very interested in getting their message out. So, "This is the message that we want to get to our students, prospective students, and so forth." But I found it a little frustrating that the conversation was all about the information that the department wanted to communicate out, but there was very little acknowledgement of what kind of information their audience was looking for or needed from them. So, it was a frustration that grew over the course of my career, until I sort of stumbled onto the field of, initially, information architecture. So, this idea of cataloging information, of organizing it in such a way that made it easy for people to find. So I thought, "Ah, that's pretty interesting. I'll go back and take a course on information architecture." But it just so happened that the course was only offered once a year, and it wasn't offered [laughs] the semester that I had intended to take it. And instead, there was available a research-methods class, where you learned the basics of usability testing and user research. So I had intended to do one thing, after becoming sort of disillusioned with the career that I had chosen, and by accident, I suppose, hit on this other sort of career interest. That was about 10 years ago, and I've been doing that ever since. Jonathan: OK. I think you're best known as a usability person. So how did that lead you to presenting and writing and talking so much about content? Angela: Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. I suppose that, with doing usability testing, mostly for websites, early in my career, I worked on a project with my graduate adviser on creating guidelines--print guidelines, in this case--for people with low literacy skills. And that project sort of expanded into, "Well, now that we've got these guidelines established for how to communicate health-care information to people who don't read easily, how would you translate that to a website?" So if you've got print guidelines, what are the corresponding web guidelines? It was just very early in my experience with usability that I was exposed to this idea of different audiences that had different needs from content and how do you satisfy those needs. I don't know. It just sort of happened that way, that content came, and how we communicate with our audiences just sort of happened, I suppose, organically, as part of the beginnings of doing this type of work. Jonathan: OK. And so, I think I first came across your work when you wrote an article for "A List Apart Magazine" in December 2010,