Customer Satisfaction Lessons Learned from Building Furniture with Wordless Documentation  

Documentation and package design play a major role in customer satisfaction. The author tested three sets of wordless documentation by building pieces of furniture from three different manufacturers. While the construction methods, packaging, and wordless documentation methods were on the surface very similar, small differences had a significant impact on the usability of the instructions and the overall customer satisfaction with the documentation and the product. Decisions that were handled differently included visual verification of parts, whether or not extra hardware was provided and how it was provided, the appropriateness of the hardware, the quality of the hardware, the need for additional tools, and the care evidenced in packaging and labeling of parts. From these experiences, she makes recommendations for enhancing customer satisfaction that apply not just to wordless documentation, but to other consumer products.

Norris Bradford, Annette. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Documentation>Technical Illustration>User Experience

Helping Users Become Experts

Helping users move from being perpetual novices to experts is a tough task. As this blog post argues, good documentation helps. But you also need to create a product that users can be passionate about.

DMN Communications (2008). Articles>Documentation>User Experience

Using Comics in Technical Documentation

This article is based on the research and feedback I received from a number of user experience designers, usability specialists, product developers and writers, which led me to engage in a dialogue with the users.

Gupta, Rajeep. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Documentation>Technical Illustration>User Experience

Why Game Documentation is Essential to a Satisfying User Experience

Documentation and information organization are an integral part of video game construction. The video game industry may be one of the directions technical communicators will move toward in the near future.

Peterson, Martin. Usability Interface (2004). Articles>Documentation>User Experience>User Centered Design

Why I Hate PDFs

I hate user manuals that are distributed as PDFs. They are mainly used online so why the artificial page constraints? I'm in the middle of a topic and all of a sudden there is a page break--not because of a topical shift but because had it been printed on 8.5 x 11 we would have run out of paper. News flash: I didn't print it and I was not running out of paper.

Hughes, Michael A. User Assistance (2008). Articles>Documentation>User Experience>Adobe Acrobat

PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience

Let me describe a familiar user assistance experience. A user installs a new application, and when the user wants Help, the application directs her to the user documentation on a Web site or CD-ROM. What the user finds there is a PDF file containing the manual—or a collection of PDF files, representing a library of manuals, including a user guide, configuration guide, troubleshooting guide, and various references. And the layout of each of these PDF manuals is exactly the same as if it were a printed book. This raises an interesting question: If we’re giving manuals to users to read online, why do we design and write them for paper?

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Documentation>User Experience>Adobe Acrobat

The Sacred Cow Blocking the Road

When product teams ask technical writers to document software products, writers usually start their projects by analyzing the tasks users will perform when working with them. A task analysis generates a list of procedures—plus the supporting information users need to follow them—and eventually results in a document in which sequentially numbered instructions are the dominant type of information—neatly organized under user-centered task headings and preceded by enabling knowledge. It sounds ideal, classical even. The problem? Users don’t read procedures.

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Documentation>Technical Writing

Improving Customer's SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) Experience with DITA

The quality of product information for customers is often an afterthought, yet the importance of any post-sales customer-facing information shouldn't be trivialized. While businesses invest heavily in customer service training and customer relationship management systems to improve customer satisfaction, they often overlook the experience that customers have with product documentation.

Silver, Jerry. SOA World Magazine (2007). Articles>Documentation>User Experience

Does Your Documentation Suck?

I’ve been browsing a lot of online documentation lately and in a past life I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about how my users were interacting with documentation. It never ceases to amaze me how bad most product documentation is, especially when the documentation is published in a half-measured attempt on the web. Do companies not realize the negative effect poor documentation, both content and presentation, have on their users?

LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>User Experience

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

Three Decades of Research and Professional Practice on Printed Software Tutorials for Novices    

Provides a historic overview of research on printed software tutorials. Describes developments in design approaches, refinements in design, and user experience.

van der Meij, Hans, Joyce Karreman and Michaël Steehouder. Technical Communication Online (2009). Articles>Documentation>Help>User Experience