http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Documentation/User-Centered-Design/Technical-Writing A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Documentation and User Centered Design and Technical Writing in the field of technical communication (and technical writing). en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Documentation/User-Centered-Design/Technical-Writing http://tc.eserver.org/34378.html http://tc.eserver.org/34378.html Users would save time by reading the manual, but instead they try to figure the application out themselves and then get lost/frustrated as they end up spending even more time getting up to speed with the application. http://tc.eserver.org/32824.html http://tc.eserver.org/32824.html Before you release a product, have some people use it. From these "test users" get solutions to problems, tips and knowledge that would help your real-life Users. Put that information in your User Documentation, and on your product support website. http://tc.eserver.org/31780.html http://tc.eserver.org/31780.html With all the talk about Web 2.0 and the attendant technologies, are readers actually being better served by documentation now than they were in the past? http://tc.eserver.org/31748.html http://tc.eserver.org/31748.html The gaps in your documentation aren’t there because you haven’t consider a particular level of user; the gaps in your documentation are there because you haven’t considered how one level of user becomes another. How DO you get from Beginner to Expert? http://tc.eserver.org/23698.html http://tc.eserver.org/23698.html The experience of setting up a new home theater system also sharply reminded me of what it is like to look at something as a new user: staring at a bunch of knobs and holes for the first time, holding a tassel of wire in one hand and a manual in the other, and really just wanting the darn piece of ?%^%! to do what it's supposed to do. http://tc.eserver.org/20552.html http://tc.eserver.org/20552.html The user-centered design of documentation is an aspect of product design that has often been under-emphasized. Difficulties inherent in documentation design include obtaining user, feedback to high-level design objectives; extracting user. feedback specific to a product’s documentation. rather than to the product as a whole; and managing the various resource constraints inherent in product development. IBM User-Centered Design offers a solution to these difficulties by employing a set of user feedback methodologies from which the documentation designer, a member of a multidisciplinary design team, extracts pertinent data to set design objectives and follow through to low-level designs. http://tc.eserver.org/19743.html http://tc.eserver.org/19743.html We often hear that users do not read documents. To lure readers into reading our documents, we must make documents user-friendly.