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Subject:Re: Impressions of Information Mapping From:Tom Tadfor Little <tlittle -at- LANL -dot- GOV> Date:Mon, 22 Jan 1996 12:57:29 -0700
Bob Boeri writes
|Question: anybody on this list have any experience with Information Mapping
|methodology, and --if so-- did you like it? If you did not find it useful, did
|you find an alternative methodology you liked better?
Yes, most editors at Los Alamos are trained in Information Mapping, and it
sees rather wide use here. I do endorse it; I find the arguments that it
enhances the usability of documents to be quite persuasive.
I have to say, however, that I rarely see "pure" IM in practice; rather
there is a tendency to simply move conventional prose into the IM layout.
Thus subsections become blocks...often hideously long blocks; maps span
many pages, and so on. This kind of compromise makes the documents seem
more familiar and demands less retraining of the authors, but it does
throw out many of the potential benefits.
Tom Tadfor Little tlittle -at- lanl -dot- gov -or- telp -at- Rt66 -dot- com
technical writer/editor Los Alamos National Laboratory
