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Robert Horn claims that his Information Mapping™ (IM) scheme includes and improves on Carroll's minimalism. He says that users might have different learning styles: minimalism might suit Holists while systems-style materials could appeal to Serialists. Presumably Horn believes that his own approach is responsive to different learning styles, although it is hard to see how it can be. His techniques appear to be strictly systems-oriented and rely on a simplistic concept of chunking. The resulting step/action/result tables are said to be easy to construct, but:
- They are tedious to read
- Narrow columns do not allow for formatting aids such as indenting
- They give few clues about relationships between pieces of information
Andrew Gilling has pointed out that "users do not need just action and result information. Other kinds of information, like reasons, options, conditions, references, and comments appear arbitrarily in either column". IM incorporates the results of much useful research, and is undoubtedly a good basis for document design: however, it is primarily a damage control theory rather than a quality control theory, ie. it appears to be aimed at stopping authors making mistakes rather than making the reader's task easier. A UK company that uses IM reports that users' initial response to strictly IMapped documents is enthusiastic, but when they come to use them they find the same problems of access and information hiding that plague conventional manuals. In fact in some respects IMapped documents are worse because of IM's restrictions on document layout.
/Next Method
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