Usability Testing: A Field Test Report

The following is a brief description of how I tested a user manual for a word processing program to be used by low-level and intermediate-level users.

Cheng, Ting Ting. Boston Broadside (1992). Articles>Usability>Testing>Documentation

Usability, Testing and Documentation

The three disciplines of usability, testing, and documentation are important to the success of hi-tech products. These three areas are often overlooked, but they have a profound affect on the end user's experience of a software product. As customers become more perceptive about IT, their expectations rise. Since customers now have more choice than ever, to be successful, a software product needs to stand out from the crowd. This article explains why the three disciplines are important to the overall success of a software solution. It concludes with recommendations for obtaining the best return on investment.

Unwalla, Mike, Andrew Swartz and Bill Matthews. TechScribe (2006). Articles>Usability>Testing>Documentation

Usable Online Documentation: A Look At Recent Research  

Online documentation often seems to be a panacea for our difficulties in providing usable documentation. Scholars and practitioners alike provide a steady stream of new ways to apply, structure, categorize, choose, and develop online documentation. However, empirical evidence, either for or against many of these ideas, is still lacking, leaving us guessing about which concepts will truly help our users and which will be technical communication's Edsels. Recent studies show conflicting information about the key usability factors in online documentation, but do offer some hints of where to begin. This article will help technical communica- tors apply theory by summarizing recent empirical studies about online documentation usability.

Ray, Eric J. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Documentation>Online>Usability

Use Self-Help to Improve Documentation Usability    

Internal usability reviews, systematic examination of documentation to identify basic usability problems, can improve your ability to address usability issues and solve usability problems. These reviews help you eliminate documentation problems before they become problems for your customer.

Spencer, SueAnn. Technical Communication Online (1996). Articles>Usability>Documentation

The User Edit Method for Evaluating the Usability of Documentation

A 'user edit' (also known as a 'usability edit') enables you to evaluate the usability of documentation (Schriver, 1991). Participants in a user edit study can either think aloud as they use the documentation to complete tasks or they can mark up the pages of the documentation to indicate where they had problems. The think-aloud protocols or marked-up pages are then reviewed for usability problems. The user edit report lists the problems and recommendations about how to improve the usability of the documentation.

Wilson, Chauncey E. Usability Interface (2006). Articles>Documentation>Editing>Usability

User-Driven Documentation: From Usability Testing to User Guide  

Rockwell Software is a $90-million company specializing in plant automation software. Offices in West Allis, Wisconsin, and Mayfield Village, Ohio allow technical communicators to work closely with development teams to design, test, and release usable, consistent software and information products. While Rockwell Software’s information development process is a multi-faceted endeavor, this paper focuses on the following three steps we implement to create our information products: interviewing customers to establish information guidelines, conducting usability tests, and writing Getting Results guides.

Butler, Scott A., Jennifer L. Giordano and Myron M. Shawala III. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Usability

User-Friendly Technical Document: Not an Oxymoron

PDF is a perfect format for assembling technical materials, so how can a PDF document work more like a standard three-ring binder? Here's how.

Baker, Donna L. Adobe (2007). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Adobe Acrobat

Voters Learn the Importance of Usability

It has been an exciting few months, what with the usability flaws in the 'butterfly ballot' in Florida possibly changing the course of history. The good news is that the controversy put usability into the public conversation with news articles, press releases, and even new research articles. It was an opportunity to explain 'what we do' to friends, relatives, and associates. Some of the lessons from the 2000 Presidential election are the basics of Usability 101.

Quesenbery, Whitney. Usability Interface (2001). Articles>Documentation>Help>Usability

What Kind of Teamwork Improves Usability?

Professionals are increasingly working in networked teams where electronic media and asynchronous communication play an important role. So how can communication behaviours in these contexts predict usability? Do efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction in the communication process lead to the same for the resulting documentation?

Edwards, Kirstie. Usability Professionals Association (2005). Articles>Documentation>Collaboration>Usability

What's Ahead for Help? Remember Your Roots  

Presents several tips for applying traditional usability standards to online help development.

Zubak, Cheryl Lockett. Intercom (2002). Articles>Documentation>Usability

When Products Become Easy to Use, What's Next for Writers?

People who follow the right trends will someday lead them. Such an opportunity now lies in the hands of technical writers, as the computer field moves toward standardized, graphical, easy-to-use interfaces.

Oram, Andrew. Boston Broadside (1991). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Documentation

User-Guide-Driven Development

In my work with Bumblebee I use an approach I call 'User-Guide-Driven Development,' or UGDD for short. The mechanics of UGDD is similar to that of Test-Driven Development (TDD), but before I write the test for a feature, I write a snippet of the user guide describing the feature I am about to implement.

Brolund, Daniel. Thoughts of a Goldfish (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design

Ninety-Five Percent of All Returned Gadgets Still Work, Americans Don't Read Manuals

Blame it on poor usability or just not reading the frickin' manual, but it turns out that 95 percent of all returned gadgets actually work despite what customers may say or think. That's right -- of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were truly broken. According to Accenture, 68 percent of all returns work but aren't meeting customer expectations -- or they are simply too confusing to use.

Fruhlinger, Joshua A. Engadget (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>United States

Don't Let Your Product's Features Become Expensive Flaws

Your product's unexplained features can turn into costly flaws. This article describes three real-world products with just such "features." It presents ways you can prevent these feature-to-flaw conversions by improving the User Documentation for your products.

Great Technical Writing (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Technical Writing

The Importance of Documentation

Computer documentation is shoddy, or more often absent. Missing information amplifies usability problems, leaving users stuck calling unfriendly technical support lines. In this installment of The cranky user, Peter Seebach explains what's missing in the documentation effort and why it is gone.

Seebach, Peter. IBM (2003). Articles>Documentation>Usability

Paper and Online Documentation Trade-Offs

This article explains the relative merits of paper and online documentation from a usability perspective. First, we look at the different types of user. Then we look at typical paper documentation and online documentation with respect to these user types. Finally, we present the relative merits of paper and online documentation for different user types.

Unwalla, Mike. TechScribe (2007). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Online

Usability in Context-Sensitive Help: Re-Imagining the Ordinary to Provide More Business Value    

Context-sensitive help is a practical way to cut down on customer support expenses and add more value to documentation. By providing more complex, context-sensitive help, the usability of the help increases while call center phone calls decrease.

Putkey, Theresa. Intercom (2009). Articles>Documentation>Help>Usability

Bringing Help to the Forefront: Strategies to Increase the Usability of Your Software User Assistance and Your Product    

Makes the case for embedded help as one of the most effective ways to integrate help within an interface. Although it can be difficult, Bleiel illustrates a way to “elegantly implement and map embedded help.”

Bleiel, Nicoletta A. Intercom (2009). Articles>Documentation>Help>Usability

Finding Information in Documentation

Finding information in documentation is easy. Or is it? This blog post argues that there's no universal solution, and that each document and each delivery method offers challenges and requires a slightly different solution.

Nesbitt, Scott. DMN Communications (2009). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Technical Writing

Documentation Usability: A Few Things I’ve Learned from Watching Users

Even though your customers may not read manuals, your tech support team probably does, which means someone is reading the manuals and using them to help others. But if your users find it easier to call someone, wait on hold for an agent, and then ask the agent a question rather than find the answer in the help, maybe your help materials aren’t very usable. Maybe increasing the usability of your company’s documentation could alleviate the need users feel to seek answers from another source.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design

Adopting Documentation Usability Techniques to Alleviate Cognitive Friction

Usability is the combination of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which the users accomplish defined goals in a given environment. User-centered documentation matches the users' mental model, thereby helping the users find information they want quickly and easily in their hour of need. The list of documentation usability criteria is fairly subjective at this time, and various opinionated discussion groups have contributed to this. Usable documentation is based on a deep understanding of the users' tasks, and this understanding can only be gained through interviewing representative users. Applying information architecture techniques, the content within documentation should be properly chunked so that the users can assimilate the information properly. Procedural guides should have a well-defined and searchable index that enables users to connect key application terms to their correct context. User-friendly documentation is always succinct, but never at the expense of omitting critical/useful information. It should be developed using a structured process so that it starts with the big picture and gradually adds lower level of details, addressing the needs of every unique group of users. Finally, the documentation must be tested among a representative group of users, and their feedback should be incorporated to make sure that it has met all of the major usability criteria.

Biswas, Debarshi Gupta and Suranjana Dasgupta. STC Usability SIG (2009). Articles>Usability>User Experience>Documentation

Can You Design Your Way to a “No User Documentation” Approach?

For simple, commonly known actions in a closed environment, you probably can design your way to a “no user documentation” approach. Good design can also lead to less documentation. However, customers may expect to do more than that with a product and, in those situations, documentation can play a key role in meeting those expectations.

Pratt, Ellis. Cherryleaf (2009). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Minimalism

Change Your Writing Style to Make Documentation More Usable and User-Friendly

When the subjects of usability and user friendliness in relation to documentation are broached, writing isn’t often the first thing that comes to mind. But it should be.

Nesbitt, Scott. DMN Communications (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>Usability

Comprehensibility as an Economic Factor

How can you guarantee a clearly understandable user manual? Is it even possible to measure the quality of technical documents or does comprehensibility merely depend on the reader? To answer these questions for the Porsche AG, content analysis provider semiotis³ developed a model to help measure the quality of documents.

Eybe, Angelika and David Messelken. TC World (2009). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Assessment

Great Documentation Is Key to Open Source Success

Listen up open source developers, if you want your project to succeed you’re going to have to do more than write great code; you’re going to have to document it, teach new users how it works and provide real-world examples of what you can do with it. That’s the message from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the creators of Django, a very successful open source, Python-based web framework. At least some Django’s success can be attributed to its thorough documentation which is not just reference materials, but also includes tutorials, topical guides and even snippets of design philosophy.

Gilbertson, Scott. Webmonkey (2009). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Open Source