Looking Information about Usability Testing of Documentation

Looking for information about Usability Testing of Documentation? There are many other models available. In a recent presentation to my local STC chapter I identified four main stages for a document's life cycle: Requirements Gathering, Design, Writing, and Maintenance.

McDaniel, Scott M. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability

Low Budget Usability Testing Can Work

With just a modest amount of equipment and effort, you can uncover some serious product glitches and potentially earn your company thousands of dollars and a sterling reputation. The first step is to get a video camera, a product prototype, and a small sample of your target audience.

Umbhua, Kurt. Boston Broadside (1991). Articles>Usability>Testing

Low-Cost Usability Testing

Southwest Airlines' low-cost methods for formal usability testing.

Hurst, Bob. Usability Professionals Association (2005). Articles>Usability>Testing

Low-Fidelity Prototyping for Technical Communicators  

Technical communicators are responsible for a great deal of what the user sees and touches. This means that more technical communicators are becoming integrated members of product design teams, bringing their expertise into the group and taking the lead in designing and evaluating their information systems, Creating low-fidelity paper prototypes of software for customer feedback sessions is an effective methodfor gathering valuable user input early in development.

Rauch, Thyra L., Dana L. Gillihan and Paul Leone. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

Lower-Literacy Users

Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox. Articles>Usability>Literacy

Review: Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method  

If you're planning to conduct a survey, invest $70 USD in Dillman's book. It provides some of the finest methodological guidance available for conducting surveys.

Zimmerman, Donald E. Technical Communication Online (2002). Articles>Reviews>Usability>Surveys

Mailing List Usability

E-mail lists are an e-marketers dream: mailing lists provide a highly targeted way of reaching people; email doesn't require you to wait until the customer remembers to go visit your site. Mailing lists allow you to extend the footprint of your website. In the literal sense (get space in the user's inbox and not just in the browser). And in the more interesting metaphorical sense: More services become possible when you can reach out to users and provide them with time-dependent information. Just remember the push fiasco: it is not the goal to lay claim to ever-increasing amounts of the users time; prompt them just enough to be useful but not so much that the email becomes a burden. Users will unsubscribe faster than you can say 'information overload.'

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2000). Articles>Usability>Email

Make It Flow: Achieving the Optimal User Experience  

Contends that human factors professionals must look beyond usability and heuristics to maximize a product's appeal.

Fruhlinger, Joshua A. Intercom (2001). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Usability

Making Do

Both Congress and the Bush administration have made more accessible Web sites a core mandate of e-government. The law known as Section 508 requires agencies to make information technology, including Web sites, accessible to people with disabilities. It forced many Webmasters to think seriously about Web design and usability for the first time. But talking about usability and making sure it happens are two different things. Usability means more than coming up with a good site design. It requires follow-through, and that's where many agencies — short-staffed and with little time or money for training — often come up short.

Robinson, Brian. Federal Computer Week (2002). Articles>Usability>Web Design>Section 508

Making Online Information Usable

So you follow all the standards and guidelines, but suffer nagging questions about whether anyone can and will use the help you’ve just written. Or management wants you to move your printed documentation online, but you wonder whether that’s really best for your users. In the course of our consulting work, we’ve done dozens of usability studies that focus on how people use a variety of printed and online documentation, including manuals, help, cue-cards, and wizards. We’d like to share some of our results and observations, in hopes that this will help you make more informed design decisions.

User Interface Engineering. Articles>Usability>Documentation

Making Research-Based Design Decisions: What is the Best Way to Get User-Centered Research Results to Practitioners?

There are about 1,000 usability-related articles published each year. My guess is that less than 5% ever have any practical, long-term value to most usability practitioners. In some cases, the topics being studied are of little interest to practitioners. In many cases the research results are simply too hard for practitioners to find.

Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2002). Articles>Publishing>User Centered Design>Usability

Making Usability Recommendations Useful and Usable    

This paper evaluates the quality of recommendations for improving a user interface resulting from a usability evaluation. The study compares usability comments written by different authors, but describing similar usability issues. The usability comments were provided by 17 professional teams who independently evaluated the usability of the website for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. The study finds that only 14 of the 84 studied comments (17%) addressing six usability problems contained recommendations that were both useful and usable. Fourteen recommendations were not useful at all. Sixteen recommendations were not usable at all. Quality problems include recommendations that are vague or not actionable, and ones that may not improve the overall usability of the application. The paper suggests characteristics for "useful and usable recommendations," that is, recommendations for solving usability problems that lead to changes that efficiently improve the usability of a product.

Molich, Rolf, Robin Jeffries and Joseph Dumas. Journal of Usability Studies (2007). Articles>Usability>Assessment>Reports

Making Use of User Research

Designing or redesigning a product often feels like a risky proposition, especially in today's business climate.

Anderson, Gretchen. uiGarden (2005). Articles>Usability>Research

Making Use of User Research

By focusing on how a product performs in the lab without broader knowledge of the user's environment and goals, measurement alone may be misleading. To get the most value and meaning out of user feedback it is important to choose the appropriate method for conducting and analyzing user research.

Anderson, Gretchen. Cooper Interaction Design (2001). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

Male and Female Attitudes Toward Computer-Mediated Group Interactions

Without question, the impact of computer-mediated communication, such as e-mail, chat groups, and group support systems on the functioning of businesses and society-at-large has been considerable. This impact has led to many assertions, like the ability of computer media to level, in some respects, the business interaction process by bringing individuals from anywhere within the business hierarchy together. Moreover, it has been maintained that it may also produce more open and democratic interactions than face-to-face communication by masking the normal trappings of authority or status that are commonly found in face-to-face communication (Sproull & Keisler,1992). However, we still do not have a firm grasp of what effect this medium has upon both male and female attitudes stemming from task-related interactions.

Bernard, Michael, Melissa Mills and Cindy Friend. Usability News (2000). Articles>Usability

Managing Customer Feedback on User Documentation

Customer-feedback concerning product documentation is an 'artifact' of value. Product/project management depends on documentation groups to play an active role in closing the feedback acceptance and incorporation cycle to the best satisfaction of the sending-customer.

Parameswaran, Jaya. Usability Interface (2005). Articles>Documentation>Usability

Managing Geographically Distributed Teams  

This paper summarizes recent literature on virtual organizations, as well as Tec-Ed’s practical experience in managing project teams whose members are in different geographic locations, have different skills and responsibilities, and seldom meet face to face. It reviews how we share corporate culture, gain insight into clients, build trust, and develop the professional synergy that enables efficient cooperation and effective results. It also discusses the challenges facing our centralized staff who support workers in regional offices, from troubleshooting unseen hardware and software to keeping corporate archives up-to-date.

Anscheutz, Lori. Tec-Ed, Inc. (1998). Articles>Usability>Management

Manuals for the Elderly: Which Information Cannot Be Missed?    

Elderly people seem to encounter more problems than people from other age groups do, when using consumer electronics products and their accompanying manuals. This may be due to the absence of some kinds of information. In this study the effects of the absence of different information types in instructions on action performance were explored for different age groups. Younger (aged 20-30 y.) and elderly (aged 60-70 y.) participants installed a VCR with the help of the manual, while working aloud. The absence of goal information, consequence information and identification information in the instructions proved to have a negative effect on task performance, especially for the elderly participants. When one of these information types was missing in the instructions, the elderly performed more actions incorrectly than when the information was stated explicitly.

Van Horen, F.M., C. Jansen, A. Maes and L. G. M. Noordman. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2001). Articles>Documentation>Usability>Elderly

Mapping the Expanding Landscape of Usability: The Case of Distributed Education    

As the environments in which we use technology become more complex and more diverse, we need to extend and expand our notion of usability to include a broad spectrum of users and user activities. We take as an example the case of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's distributed education program for human-computer interaction (HCI). While HCI is the subject matter for the courses, the courses themselves present a challenging case study in HCI usability.

Grice, Roger A. and William Hart-Davidson. Journal of Computer Documentation (2002). Articles>Usability>Education>Online

Market Research and Usability

I am a usability consultant and I believe, and find in practice, that usability evaluation is the best way to find out whether a document works for its users. However, I have frequently been in a position where my clients have decided to 'do market research' because they believe that they have a problem document and they think 'we’ll ask our customers about it.' Usability evaluation is one type of market research but it is not the most frequently used technique. In this article, I introduce some of the more common techniques and what you might expect to learn about a document by using them. I’ll use the example of a car owner’s manual–the small book that comes with a car, and explains things like how to change the oil and what the switches mean.

Jarrett, Caroline. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability

Measuring Online Experience: It's About More Than Time!

Users' specific online activities, their knowledge of computers and the Internet, and how they feel about being online could differ significantly. In order to obtain a more robust measure, researchers may want to consider how and what users think, feel, and do online when they assess level of experience. In this article we explore each of these areas and present a new measure of measuring online experience.

Rogers, Bonnie Lida. Usability News (2003). Articles>Usability>Testing>Online

Measuring the Success of Visual Communication in User Interfaces  

Discusses three key areas of visual communication--information access and navigation, icon recognition, and visual appeal--as related to usability research.

Rosenbaum, Stephanie L. and J.O. 'Joe' Bugental. Tec-Ed, Inc. (2002). Articles>Usability>User Interface

Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design

A field study identified twenty-two ways that automated hospital systems can result in the wrong medication being dispensed to patients. Most of these flaws are classic usability problems that have been understood for decades.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Usability>Biomedical