What I Learned as a Writer from Doing Usability and Interface Testing

Usability testing was an important success factor in a recent project on designing an online interactive help system. As a group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, we had widely ranging backgrounds, but none of us had experience with usability testing or user observations. Involvement with our users provided a great deal of expected and unexpected feedback to the group, and helped us tremendously to learn more about our users, and ourselves as writers and information designers. As a writer, I hadn’t had any experience with usability testing. When I recently returned to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University, however, I worked with a team of other writers to create a prototype of an interactive online interactive help system. Part of our work included user interviews and observations, and usability testing for our prototype. Although this was a rich learning environment overall, our team felt strongly that we learned the most from our experiences working directly with our users. Maybe the reason is because we thought that we knew our users and what they wanted.

Jackson, Anne F. Usability Interface (2002). Articles>Usability>Writing