Made-up things need cutaways too.

[via Kottke]

“Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.” -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

[…as tweeted by @hotdogsladies.]

Making good how-to content is incredibly difficult, and I hate it.

If you’re crafting a pure explanation — say, explaining what makes a car go — your job is not to make sure your audience groks every little detail of what all the thousands of individual pieces do. Your job is to illuminate some basic principles to form a complete thought. You go only as deep as you need to, and you can use all the metaphors and generalizations you like. It’s a delight.

If your subject is “How to fix your car,” on the other hand, you’ve set out to cover every step involved in fixing every possible problem (at least if you’re being thorough). Skip a crucial step, and your guide is potentially useless to your audience. When you’re teaching something in person, your audience will let you know when you missed something. When you’re making how-to content — articles, video, comics — it’s on you to cover just about everything somebody might need.

So, I hate making how-to stuff, and I respect people who take on such a daring mission with good intentions. Which is all a long preamble to congratulating Howcast on their launch today.

The new site, run by ex-Googlers, is basically a warehouse of short how-to videos. As the site’s “What is Howcast” video explains, anybody can start a “Wiki guide,” which “members of the Howcast network” may turn into short video pieces. Techcrunch’s post sheds a little more light:

Audience members can also look at upcoming scripts and improve them or write their own in a guided wiki portion of the site that follows the Howcast script template (introduction, instructions, tips, end with a fact). The script is then approved by Howcast, a voiceover is recorded, and Howcast farms out the production to young film school students and graduates. They get $50 for each video plus a 50/50 rev-share from any advertising. Anyone can also upload their own instructional videos to the site without going through this process.

I’ve only sampled a few videos so far, but I see some features I like. Online video is a logical choice for how-to because it lends itself to thorough demonstrations, but it’s also frustratingly linear. When you need to backtrack for a second to check something, it’s much more of a pain to rewind than to scan up a page of text and diagrams. Howcast has done a good job addressing this. Every video comes with a text-and-picture summary, a transcript, a list of tools and supplies you’ll need, and marker points for where each step appears in the video. Not bad.

Nice Web-1.0 name too. Here’s what the page looked like way back in 1999.

[Link]
[Via Techcrunch]

Jake McKee over at Community Guy recently posted a link to CarType’s collection of wonderful car cutaways. I love these things, especially when they come with call-outs that give you some hope of actually figuring out what’s going on under the hood.

Of all my worldly possessions, my car is the thing most in need of explaining. Like just about everybody, I don’t own anything else nearly as complicated, and don’t put nearly as much trust in any other machine. Every day, I count on all these intricate pieces banding together and keeping me alive as I zip along at ridiculous speeds. This is something that deserves to be fully understood.

Keep ‘em coming CarType.

[Link]

An animation by Devin Flynn that excellently explains what happens inside your ear when sounds come rolling through, in the style of little kid filmstrips and Sesame Street:

[Found via the Super Deluxe blog]

Don’t leave good metaphors lying around unattended, or somebody might get hurt. Up to a certain point, a good metaphor does wonders to facilitate understanding. But as you get deeper into a subject, a metaphor will become less and less accurate. And if you don’t toss the metaphor when it starts to go bad, it will actually block deeper understanding.

So, metaphors get you over a learning hump, but you can’t be too devoted to them. They’re like training wheels that… . That one fell apart before it even got started.

Anyway, one of the biggest, hairiest, most useful and potentially most troublesome metaphors of our time is the idea that computers are brains (and vice versa). This one is so mighty, in fact, that it’s easy to forget it’s actually a metaphor. And if you take it too literally, you’ll fundamentally misunderstand both computers and brains.

In a new smarty-pants post on Developing Intelligence, Chris Chatham puts computers and brains side by side and rattles off 11 metaphor-busting differences between them. In the process, he sheds a lot of light on both. For example, difference number 8 is that in the brain, processing and memory are handled by the same components. One effect of this is that you can easily overwrite a memory with an inaccurate version in the process of remembering it. Please, remember with care.

In addition to the illuminating explanations throughout, I really like how Chatham gets some more use out of a metaphor before chucking it. Once you’ve learned all you can by seeing two things as the same, see what you can learn by investigating how they’re different. Good trick.

[via Cognitive Daily]

Khoi Vinh over at The Subtraction Blog has a great new post about “touristic usability.” His basic notion is that an entire city is comparable to an application, and should be intuitive like a good application. As he puts it, “given any new city, there are certain things that should be easy for tourists to comprehend without assistance.”

This is an excellent point, and the way Vinh presents it, it seems so completely obvious. But most big cities I’ve been to do a pretty poor job of explaining themselves and are rife with complicated procedure and jargon. This is really weird, when you consider how much money big cities dump into promoting tourism. Vinh gives a good example of the consequences of bad touristic usability:

To call anyone anywhere from these phones [in Paris], you must possess a calling card, which must be bought at newsstands or other convenience vendors. But I had no way of intuiting that from any of the instructional signage presented with the pay phones, and no guidebook, and therefore no other recourse. It was supremely frustrating and had the feeling of a tremendous gap in someone’s municipal planning. For me in that moment, it reflected poorly — on all of Paris, not necessarily on the Parisian telecommunications infrastructure alone.

As an explainist, I mostly agree. But I do think a certain amount of unexplained usability weirdness in a city is good, since it adds character and gives locals the home court advantage.

Quick shoutout to RSG for pointing to United Technologies’ use of exploded view animated diagrams to explain the Sikorsky S-92 Helicopter, PW600 Jet Engine, and other neat things. Very cool.

United sort of ran out of steam when they applied exploded view to their Employee Scholars program — it’s just an un-technical drawing of a guy’s head with various objects in it that expand and grow labels/explanation when you roll over them. Kind of a let-down after all that awesome. Also, I wish they’d included some sort of permalink system inside the animation, because then I could be pointing you to the coolest parts of it.

[linky]

And now, a musical interlude. This video from Norwegian band Röyksopp doesn’t exactly explain anything, but it uses the tools of good explanation to thrilling effect. And it illustrates nicely how much data, complexity and remarkable thinking flows through daily life.

The artistry is clearly awesome, but the delicious topping for me is that they bothered to make so much of this stuff accurate (or at least accuratish). For example, the escalator cutaway is highly detailed and right on the money, and it’s only onscreen for four seconds. There’s a good bit of playful exaggeration too — the parts of the ear are drawn correctly, but sound waves trigger a bouncier cartoon chain reaction than you would actually see.I’ve had a hand in building animated cutaway diagrams before — the type of thing that makes up only a few frames in this video — and fitting the details together is no small chore. Kudos to those responsible, the French production company H5, according to Wikipedia and others. (My kudos are way late, apparently. The video already won best video at the MTV Europe Music Awards, way back in 2002).

I found a bit of interesting chatter in the YouTube comments on the video. Several posters took it for granted that this was a depressing view of mundane modern life. I really don’t see it that way. Normally, I do get discouraged by musical montages of workers filing into offices or even families chaotically taking off in the morning (a staple of supposedly cheery breakfast treat ads). The notion that life is hectically repetitive for no discernible reason makes me queasy. But this video was actually uplifting to me.

For one thing, I love to be reminded that there is so much to learn about even incredibly ordinary stuff. After all, there aren’t really many boring things, just boring people. It’s good to turn on the awestruck wonder whenever you can. Also, I’m comforted by the idea that even though there’s a lot of complexity under the surface of everything, I could actually figure out what was going on if I took the time to sort through the detailed, readily available information. It’s the same comfort I get walking through the library or bookstore. I may not want to learn all about building construction at a particular moment, but it’s good to know I could pick up several books on the subject (and understand them) if I were so inclined. Nice to have signs that the roads are open.

PS: I intended this post to be pure praise, since 100% of our posts to date have had a bit of finger wagging in them, but I can’t ignore the bad splainin’ on both Röyksopp and H5’s Web sites.

Röyksopp greeted me only with this and an album promotion pop-up:

Which details did you need? Shoe size? Favorite Pop Tart flavor?

H5 gave me little more:

Very strange to have such dead-end home pages in this day and age.

Remember how silly it seemed when your fourth grade math teacher
insisted you always include units next to numbers that describe real world things? …Like 10 inches instead of just 10, or 30 days instead of 30. Showing early signs of the smartass I was to develop in to, I always thought, “This is totally unnecessary. Of course I’m going to remember what it is, I’m the one who wrote it.”

That’s all fine when you’re doing a homework assignment, but when you’re trying to communicate information to someone who may not be in the same room as you, data is flat and useless without units(and context). It’s bad explanation practice.

Case in point: Look at this graph that’s included in my water bill each month:

What the heck is a CCF? What do the water usage habits of others look like? What can this graph tell me? I suppose just knowing how I’m using water month-to-month is better than nothing, but if you’re going to go to the trouble to include this chart the least you could do is tell me what a “CCF” is. I can’t imagine most average citizens can make any meaning out of that abbreviation. Also, based on things like temperature and seasonality, I’m sure my water needs differ from month to month. How about helping me account for that? And what would be super-awesome is if you’d give me some frame of reference for my data. Am I a total water slob or a miser? What are some ways I could work on this? How will I know next month if I’m doing better?