Commentary 10 The institutionalizing of user edits after Atlas. Reflecting on Atlas's User Edit: Changes in Thinking about Usability Between 1981 and 1998 Karen A. Schriver KSA Document Design and Research Oakmont, PA k50e+@andrew.cmu.edu If a sign of a good article is that it makes a lasting impact on its readers, then Marshall Atlas's article "The User Edit" deserves to be counted among the landmarks in our field on usability. Atlas showed how reader-oriented methods developed in psychology could be used profitably to inform studies of document design. Atlas's modest essay articulates the value of listening carefully to the audience in judging the effectiveness of documents. Although professionals now take the idea of "listening to users" as a given, this perspective was fairly rare in the early 1980s (Hayes, 1982). At the time, our field's persistent preoccupation with readability formulas was on the wane but there was little discussion of alternative methods for evaluating the quality of document design. Even rhetorical studies-with its rich tradition in understanding the nature of audiences-offered little research on audience analysis in professional settings. Atlas's work generated interest among the document design community to refine its methods for assessing text quality. Subsequent to
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