http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Methods A listing of the most recently indexed works about Methods in the field of technical communication. 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/Methods http://tc.eserver.org/35599.html http://tc.eserver.org/35599.html User research focused on single experiences with a feature or workflow uncovers different problems and issues than longitudinal research. http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites. http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points. http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and personality. Even for a book on business planning, for instance, "Sally Startup" has different needs than does "Vic Venture." http://tc.eserver.org/35368.html http://tc.eserver.org/35368.html Prototyping is a big deal right now. We get wrapped up in mailing list threads, new tools are released at an astonishing pace, books are being published, and articles show up on Boxes & Arrows. Clients are even asking for prototypes. But here’s the thing… prototyping is not a silver bullet. There is no one right way to do it. However, prototyping is a high silver content bullet. When aimed well, a prototype can answer design questions and communicate design ideas. In this article, I talk about the dimensions of prototype fidelity and how you can use them to choose the most effective prototyping method for the questions you need answered. http://tc.eserver.org/35317.html http://tc.eserver.org/35317.html Usability tests are a core design tool and, when done well, they deliver tremendous insights to the team. However, when a usability test is done poorly, it can be a disaster for everyone involved. An important key to their success is the work of a great moderator. http://tc.eserver.org/35308.html http://tc.eserver.org/35308.html Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design. http://tc.eserver.org/35271.html http://tc.eserver.org/35271.html One of the key characteristics of a manipulation technique versus related techniques like transformation is that the underlying data remains unchanged. The main thing we’re doing is changing the relationship - logical or physical - that one piece of data has with another. Reorganizing the data helps us to identify patterns that may otherwise not be apparent. In fact, it is almost certain that most patterns won’t be visible at first glance. Let’s start by taking a more detailed look at some of the processes that contribute to the manipulation of data. http://tc.eserver.org/35272.html http://tc.eserver.org/35272.html On a recent project I needed to collect and analyze the content management templates in use across a large enterprise Intranet. We were looking to inventory the diversity of templates in use; whether they existed outside or within the enterprise content management system; what changes might be made to the ‘official’ template set to reduce the overall number of templates, and to prepare for the migration of all content to a new design a few months down the track. I looked around at the literature for information architecture and Web design generally and found quite a few references to content inventories and content analysis, but nothing on analyzing templates. http://tc.eserver.org/35266.html http://tc.eserver.org/35266.html Preparing for usability testing requires a surprisingly large amount of planning. Here are the 6 key steps you should go through to get ready. http://tc.eserver.org/35239.html http://tc.eserver.org/35239.html All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account. http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html I believe designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters. So, developing their character-building and storytelling skills can help designers—just as it does actors. http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html It's easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem. http://tc.eserver.org/34938.html http://tc.eserver.org/34938.html Every day in offices around the world usability professionals ask and are asked this question: How many users do we need for our usability test? Its an important question. We want to find most of and the most severe problems. So, we need to test enough people. But usability testing is so expensive, and the cost of testing increases with each participant. So, we don't want to test too many, either. http://tc.eserver.org/34943.html http://tc.eserver.org/34943.html We present a study comparing usability testing of a single interface versus three functionally equivalent but stylistically distinct designs. We found that when presented with a single design, users give significantly higher ratings and were more reluctant to criticize than when presented with the same design in a group of three. Our results imply that by presenting users with alternative design solutions, subjective ratings are less prone to inflation and give rise to more and stronger criticisms when appropriate. Contrary to our expectations, our results also suggest that usability testing by itself, even when multiple designs are presented, is not an effective vehicle for soliciting constructive suggestions about how to improve the design from end users. It is a means to identify problems, not provide solutions. http://tc.eserver.org/34947.html http://tc.eserver.org/34947.html Now that I have your attention, I’ll tell you up front that what Janea follows is not a rant. It’s not even a statement for or against Triplett political correctness. It’s a caution–words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype. http://tc.eserver.org/34949.html http://tc.eserver.org/34949.html Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development. http://tc.eserver.org/34875.html http://tc.eserver.org/34875.html The trade show booth on the exhibit floor of a conference is traditionally used for company representatives to sell their products and services. However, the trade booth environment also creates an opportunity, for it can give the development team easy access to many varied participants for usability testing. The question is can we adapt usability testing methods to work in such an environment? Extremely rapid usability testing (ERUT) does just this, where we deploy a combination of questionnaires, interviews, storyboarding, co-discovery, and usability testing in a trade show booth environment. We illustrate ERUT in actual use during a busy photographic trade show. It proved effective for actively gathering real-world user feedback in a rapid paced environment where time is of the essence. http://tc.eserver.org/34772.html http://tc.eserver.org/34772.html The project milestone sheet is an incredibly important document for freelancers and their clients. It defines all the most important tasks, who is assigned to them, and when they are due. In other words, it serves as the map for your entire work process. http://tc.eserver.org/34562.html http://tc.eserver.org/34562.html In our research, we've found that teams that build out a re-use strategy see tangible benefits: They are more likely to get a completed design sooner, with all the little nuances and details that make for a great experience. Their designs are more likely to meet users expectations by behaving consistently across the entire functionality. Plus, the teams iterate faster (always a good thing), giving them a chance to play with the design while it's still malleable. http://tc.eserver.org/34565.html http://tc.eserver.org/34565.html After talking to several dozen craftspeople about why they hunker, we think we have a pretty good idea what's happening here. As they're building their design, they have a solid picture in their mind of what they are creating. However, when they put the physical pieces into the basic form, things aren't quite right. In essence, it's disorienting. Once the craftsperson has disoriented themself, they go through a process of reconciliation. Either the work-in-progress needs correction or the design in their head needs adjustment. http://tc.eserver.org/34456.html http://tc.eserver.org/34456.html The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions. http://tc.eserver.org/34460.html http://tc.eserver.org/34460.html The benefits of user testing have long been established. It is still important however to try and maximise these benefits. One way in which this can be done is by viewing the user test yourself. http://tc.eserver.org/34462.html http://tc.eserver.org/34462.html Focus groups are a great way to collect information from several people very quickly and cost effectively. They are mainly used to gauge people’s reactions and feelings to items, however when used appropriately they can also be used as part of user requirements gathering. http://tc.eserver.org/34465.html http://tc.eserver.org/34465.html The key principal of UCD is integrating users that represent the profiles of the target user group/s into the development process. Typically, friends, family and (most definitely) colleagues are not representative of the target user base! However, they’re nearly always free with advice. But the validity of this advice is often questionable. In order to integrate unbiased user feedback into the process the following are key steps in a UCD process. http://tc.eserver.org/34280.html http://tc.eserver.org/34280.html Critical thinking is the art of raising what is subconscious in our reasoning to the level of conscious recognition. It is the art of taking control of our thinking processes so as to understand the pathway and inputs that our thinking employs. http://tc.eserver.org/33721.html http://tc.eserver.org/33721.html There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as experience design. One reason for this change in terminology is that it lets us talk about a specific target audience in terms that resonate with business stakeholders more than the generic term user—for example, customer experience, patient experience, or member experience. The other reason for using the term experience design rather than user experience design is that it recognizes the fact that most customer interactions are multifaceted and complex and include all aspects of a customer’s interaction with a company or other organizational entity, including its people, services, and products. http://tc.eserver.org/33666.html http://tc.eserver.org/33666.html The beauty of the whiteboard method is that your report becomes simply a summary of what you have already written on the whiteboard, including completion metrics, findings, and recommendations that have been vetted by key stakeholders. http://tc.eserver.org/33593.html http://tc.eserver.org/33593.html You’ve conducted your user interviews, but now you need to make sense of all that information you’ve gathered. These best practice tips will help you analyse the results. http://tc.eserver.org/33496.html http://tc.eserver.org/33496.html This study examined the effect on survey results of having no neutral or mid-point on a Likert scale. Participants in a face-to-face omnibus survey were shown either a five point (with mid -point) or four point (no mid-point) Likert scale of importance on a card and asked to state their opinion about the importance of product labelling (additives, ingredients etc.) on packaged foods. This research provides some evidence that social desirability bias, arising from respondents' desires to please the interviewer or appear helpful or not be seen to give what they perceive to be a socially unacceptable answer, can be minimised by eliminating the mid-point ('neither... nor', uncertain etc.) category from Likert scales. There is also some evidence that the presence or absence of a mid-point on an importance scale produces distortions in the results obtained. http://tc.eserver.org/33507.html http://tc.eserver.org/33507.html This article describes a pilot effort for an accreditation-driven writing assessment in a business college, detailing the pilot's logistics and methods. Supported by rubric software and a philosophy of "real readers, real documents," the assessment was piloted in summer 2006 with five evaluators who were English instructors and four who worked or taught in business environments. The nine evaluators were each given 10 reports that were drawn from a sample of 50 reports completed in a writing-intensive course. They created 88 individual assessments using a 10-category rubric. While the overarching purpose of the pilot was to determine the effectiveness of the methods used, the results may also be of interest to those involved with the assessment of writing. http://tc.eserver.org/33457.html http://tc.eserver.org/33457.html Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases. http://tc.eserver.org/33446.html http://tc.eserver.org/33446.html Gorilla usability is about getting out from behind the video camera, the reports, the stats and all the guru commandments and actually getting to know your users. http://tc.eserver.org/33344.html http://tc.eserver.org/33344.html Subjective evaluation is an important component in the evaluation of workstation usability. We have developed and standardized a general user evaluation instrument for interactive computer systems. The methods of psychological test construction were applied in order to ensure proper construct and empirical validity of the items and to assess their reliability. A hierarchical approach was taken in which overall usability was divided into subcomponents which constituted independent psychometric scales. For example, subcomponents include character readability, usefulness of online help, and meaningfulness of error messages. Evaluation on these scales is assessed by user ratings of specific system attributes such as character definition, contrast, font, and spacing for the scale of character readability. http://tc.eserver.org/33345.html http://tc.eserver.org/33345.html The Software Usability Measurement Inventory is a rigorously tested and proven method of measuring software quality from the end user's point of view. SUMI is a consistent method for assessing the quality of use of a software product or prototype, and can assist with the detection of usability flaws before a product is shipped. It is backed by an extensive reference database embedded in an effective analysis and report generation tool. http://tc.eserver.org/33298.html http://tc.eserver.org/33298.html Task analysis analyses what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to achieve a task. A detailed task analysis can be conducted to understand the current system and the information flows within it. These information flows are important to the maintenance of the existing system and must be incorporated or substituted in any new system. Task analysis makes it possible to design and allocate tasks appropriately within the new system. The functions to be included within the system and the user interface can then be accurately specified. http://tc.eserver.org/33299.html http://tc.eserver.org/33299.html Task analysis can be defined as the study of what a user is required to do, in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes, to achieve a task objective. The idea is that task analysis provides some structure for the description of tasks or activities, which then makes it easier to describe how activities fit together, and to explore what the implications of this may be for the design of products. This can be particularly useful when considering the design of interfaces to products, and how users interact with them. http://tc.eserver.org/33300.html http://tc.eserver.org/33300.html In this paper we critically review task analysis models and techniques. These approaches to task analysis are discussed in order to develop a richer picture of human activity, while analyzing their limitations, general weaknesses, and possibilities for improvement. We consider their ability to determine the appropriate set of atomic actions in a task, their effect on workers’ motivational needs, their support of users’ cognitive and sociocultural processes, and their effectiveness in supporting interface design. We note that the major approaches have focused on very different levels of analysis, and call for greater integration of these different levels in task analysis theory. http://tc.eserver.org/33301.html http://tc.eserver.org/33301.html Who are the intended offsiteuser and what are their offsitetask? (Why will they use the system? What is their experience and expertise?) What are the offsitetechnical and offsiteenvironmental constraints? (What types of hardware will be used in what organisational, technical and physical environments?) http://tc.eserver.org/33137.html http://tc.eserver.org/33137.html This is a method for discovering the latent structure in an unsorted list of statements or ideas. The investigator writes each statement on a small index card and requests six or more informants to sort these cards into groups or clusters, working on their own. The results of the individual sorts are then combined and if necessary analysed statistically. http://tc.eserver.org/33143.html http://tc.eserver.org/33143.html Ratios are at the core of any well-designed grid system. Sometimes those ratios are rational, such as 1:2 or 2:3, others are irrational such as the 1:1.414 (the proportion of A4). This first part is about how to combine those ratios to create simple, balanced grids which in turn will help you create harmonious compositions. http://tc.eserver.org/33144.html http://tc.eserver.org/33144.html Aesthetics can be measured and more importantly can be constructed. If you want something to be aesthetically pleasing there are steps you can take to make sure it is going in the right direction. Now I'm not saying that 'follow these rules and you will create something beautiful'. What I am saying is that by following a few of these guidelines can go some way into creating something compositionally balanced, which will inherently be more aesthetically pleasing. http://tc.eserver.org/33145.html http://tc.eserver.org/33145.html Designing grid systems for print is considerably more straight forward than designing grid systems for the web. First off,in print, the designer has a fixed media size - the paper size (or packaging, poster, whatever). Let's say a print designer has designed a magazine. The reader of this magazine can't suddenly increase the font size if they find it difficult to read - well they just move it closer to their eyes I guess. This is just one consideration, there are more but I'm sure you get the point. http://tc.eserver.org/33146.html http://tc.eserver.org/33146.html Fixed width grid design for the web. What is it, how do we do it and how do we implement it? For the purposes of this article, I'm going to be focussing on the theory of creating the grid rather than the implementation. I did mention in the last series that I would cover implementation using CSS, well I'm not going to. There are just so many resources and books available telling you how to create the CSS layouts you need—I'll touch on it, but I won't be going into too much detail. http://tc.eserver.org/33147.html http://tc.eserver.org/33147.html Flexible vs Fixed. Which one to choose? Why choose one over the other? Well you won't find the answers to those questions here. What I'm aiming to do with this article is to investigate how the theory of grid design can be applied to a flexible web page. http://tc.eserver.org/33153.html http://tc.eserver.org/33153.html During art college I was subjected to a lecture on the Golden Section (who remembers that lecture, come on hands up?), that ambiguous set of rectangles that is requisite art school discussion. During this lecture I was shown slide after slide of seemingly tenuous links between paintings and sculptures, and this set of rectangles. My lecturer at the time seemed as equally uninterested, droning along in self-imposed boredom. What he failed to convey at the time, has taken me over 15 years to even begin to understand. So what is the importance of these boring rectangles and how do they relate to design? http://tc.eserver.org/33113.html http://tc.eserver.org/33113.html Outlines some common objections to doing user research and provides some defense against them. http://tc.eserver.org/32800.html http://tc.eserver.org/32800.html One powerful design tool, personas, can help provide a framework for building Intranets that will satisfy a variety of needs. Effectively developed and used, personas enable Intranet teams to hone in on user needs and build interfaces and user experiences that end-user audiences can and will use. http://tc.eserver.org/32805.html http://tc.eserver.org/32805.html This article provides general guidelines for card sorting analysis and interpretation. Tips include how to deal with dual group membership, individual differences, effects of semantic clustering, and items in a miscellaneous group. http://tc.eserver.org/32708.html http://tc.eserver.org/32708.html Sufficient response rates are important for surveys. A survey that collects very little data may not contain substantial information. In order to collect successful responses, researchers must take into consideration the audience, the quantity of online surveys in circulation, and the potential for surveys reported as spam. These factors may result in lower respondent interest and acceptance of survey invitations. But there are ways to increase response rates! http://tc.eserver.org/32709.html http://tc.eserver.org/32709.html This guide provides information on writing successful and effective survey questions, creating survey flow and layout, calculating response rates, tips for increasing response rates, and the pros and cons of online surveys. (Plus an appendix of links and works cited for additional help in survey design.) http://tc.eserver.org/32679.html http://tc.eserver.org/32679.html Most content management organizations promote the concept that in order to reuse content you must segment content into topics. This approach works well for technical information because with technical content you are describing concepts, asking people to perform tasks or follow steps, or providing reference material. Consequently, you can reasonably and easily create topics that represent concise ideas, and ultimately, small chunks of content. However, while people might comprehend the benefits that topic-oriented documentation provides, they generally don't grasp the downsides of such an approach. http://tc.eserver.org/32693.html http://tc.eserver.org/32693.html So, the mandate has come down from senior management to "put those manuals online!" Now what do you do? As you know, there are many types of online manuals—but which is best for your situation? This article discusses the options. http://tc.eserver.org/32634.html http://tc.eserver.org/32634.html Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. In this article, I’ll try to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts. http://tc.eserver.org/32541.html http://tc.eserver.org/32541.html What do team members need? Purpose and goals defined. Roles defined. Best practice processes developed and shared early within the team development. Cross-functional relationships and collaboration fostered. Culture supporting structure and processes. Reward systems updated to reflect virtual structure. http://tc.eserver.org/32356.html http://tc.eserver.org/32356.html Usability practice needs a procedure to identify, record, count, and highlight tool switch events for study. This paper describes one that supports the trained observers on which User-Centered Design relies to detect problems and causes, and evaluate design changes. http://tc.eserver.org/32357.html http://tc.eserver.org/32357.html This article is a case study of a demonstration project intended to prove the value of usability testing to a large textbook publishing house. In working with a new client, however, the research team discovered that what our client thought were simple problems for their users were actually complex problems that required the users to evaluate potential solutions in a surprisingly complex context of use. As Redish (2007) predicted, traditional ease of use measures were "not sufficient" indicators and failed to reveal the complex nature of the tasks. Users reported high levels of satisfaction with products being tested and believed they had successfully completed tasks which they judged as easy to complete when, in fact, they unknowingly suffered failure rates as high as 100%. The study recommends that usability specialists expand our definition of traditional usability measures so that measures include external assessment by content experts of the completeness and correctness of users' performance. The study also found that it is strategically indispensable for new clients to comprehend the upper end of complexity in their products because doing so creates a new space for product innovation. In this case, improving our clients' understanding of complexity enabled them to perceive and to take advantage of a new market niche that had been unrealized for decades. http://tc.eserver.org/32165.html http://tc.eserver.org/32165.html Qualitative sampling methods have been largely ignored in technical communication texts, making this concept difficult to teach in graduate courses on research methods. Using concepts from qualitative health research, this article provides a primer on qualitative methods as an initial effort to fill this gap in the technical communication literature. Specifically, the authors attempt to clarify some of the current confusion over qualitative sampling terminology, explain what qualitative sampling methods are and why they need to be implemented, and offer examples of how to apply commonly used qualitative sampling methods. http://tc.eserver.org/32027.html http://tc.eserver.org/32027.html Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that has emerged in recent years. Notable examples of the model include Threadless, iStockphoto, InnoCentive, the Goldcorp Challenge, and user-generated advertising contests. This article provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, both its theoretical grounding and exemplar cases, taking care to distinguish crowdsourcing from open source production. This article also explores the possibilities for the model, its potential to exploit a crowd of innovators, and its potential for use beyond forprofit sectors. Finally, this article proposes an agenda for research into crowdsourcing. http://tc.eserver.org/31983.html http://tc.eserver.org/31983.html This article is about better commenting practices for the purpose of—perhaps—helping some to better their programming practices. But before beginning, let me qualify the entire thing by saying that I am not a programmer—not the professional kind anyway. I have created small programs in the past for some of my employers, but that is not how I make my living. Therefore, I am not trying to teach principles of programming. I am only a writing teacher who happens to enjoy programming as a hobby. And while I cannot provide insight into better programming principles, I can offer guidance about writing those short pieces of text programmers always embed, but sometimes neglect. Helping students write better documents is, after all, my occupation; and believe it or not the principles I teach to write better papers are not that different from the principles needed to write better code. http://tc.eserver.org/31936.html http://tc.eserver.org/31936.html A basic introduction to user interviews, a great way to build research on your users and help improve the usability of your site. http://tc.eserver.org/31877.html http://tc.eserver.org/31877.html A common frustration among UX professionals who are employed in the software development industry is the perception that executive-level management gives lip service to user experience rather than supporting specific UX activities by allocating sufficient resources for them. http://tc.eserver.org/31652.html http://tc.eserver.org/31652.html This paper focuses on the interaction between test participants and test facilitator in two variants of the think-aloud method. In a first, explorative study, we analyzed think-aloud transcripts from two usability tests: a concurrent think-aloud test and a constructive interaction test. The results of our analysis show that while the participants in both studies never explicitly addressed the facilitator, the think-aloud participants showed more signs of awareness of the facilitator than the participants in the constructive interaction test. This finding may have practical implications for the validity of the two methods. http://tc.eserver.org/31600.html http://tc.eserver.org/31600.html Regardless of the cause for your company’s resource crunch, focus on getting small wins as often as possible throughout your involvement in a project. This is a fairly common piece of advice that crops up time and time again, but it’s very much worth repeating. And it applies just as readily to both situations where time is short and those when there’s just not enough of you to go around. http://tc.eserver.org/31588.html http://tc.eserver.org/31588.html A downward trend in survey response rates is often blamed on the fact that people simply become tired of taking surveys. Butthere are ways to avoid the malaise setting in, says Angela Sinickas, a key one being making sure thatpeople feel their opinions are actually being listened to. Here she shares three common causes of survey fatigue and how to deal with them. http://tc.eserver.org/31589.html http://tc.eserver.org/31589.html This month's column is a quiz. I'll set up some scenarios, you choose which research approach you think is best. At the end, I'll defend why I think my own answers are right! http://tc.eserver.org/31592.html http://tc.eserver.org/31592.html The wonders of technology have opened up easy-to-use on-line survey creation and analysis. Yet if you take the numbers the surveys provide at face value, you may be under-representing your audience's true responses. The following examples demonstrate how to phrase questions for more accurate results. http://tc.eserver.org/31591.html http://tc.eserver.org/31591.html All too often companies conduct a survey and do nothing with the results. This problem can be avoided by making sure that management is committed to acting on the findings before you even conduct the research (the topic of this month's column) and developing highly actionable research tools (covered last month). http://tc.eserver.org/31594.html http://tc.eserver.org/31594.html All too often companies conduct a survey and do nothing with the results. This problem can be minimized through developing a highly actionable survey in the first place (the topic of this month's column) and making sure that management is committed to acting on the findings (to be covered next month). Here are some suggestions for developing a survey that leads to highly actionable results. http://tc.eserver.org/31593.html http://tc.eserver.org/31593.html Who has time to do communication audits anymore? Only the lucky few. The author shows ways to find out everything you need to know, just as fast as you need to know it. http://tc.eserver.org/31595.html http://tc.eserver.org/31595.html The number of surveys to send out depends on how many employees you have and what rate of response you are likely to achieve. If you have a relatively small number of employees, you might need to send out surveys to everyone. If you have over several thousand employees, you would need only 500-600 completed surveys to have fairly reliable results for your population as a whole, assuming the respondents accurately reflect the demographics of the entire group. So, if you expect to have a 100% response rate, you would mail out surveys to a random sample of 600. More realistically, if you typically have a response rate of 50%, you'd need to survey 1,200 people (600 divided by 0.5). http://tc.eserver.org/31542.html http://tc.eserver.org/31542.html You can't wait for the employee survey each year to see if you're making improvements in your change communication - you need to measure now. Polls are the pulse takers that give snapshots of perceptions. They describe how people are coping with change, what they are thinking, how they are feeling and the extent to which they are supportive of organizational goals. Tudor Williams, ABC, outlines the critical factors in ensuring your polls are accurate, usable and result in valid sets of data. http://tc.eserver.org/31265.html http://tc.eserver.org/31265.html The ADDIE model is the generic process traditionally used by instructional designers and training developers. The five phases—Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation—represent a dynamic, flexible guideline for building effective training and performance support tools. http://tc.eserver.org/31267.html http://tc.eserver.org/31267.html This site is designed to provide information about instructional design principles and how they relate to teaching and learning. Instructional design, also know as instructional systems design, is the is the analysis of learning needs and systematic development of instruction. Instructional designers often use instructional technology or educational technology as tools for developing instruction http://tc.eserver.org/31266.html http://tc.eserver.org/31266.html The idea of rapid prototyping as it applies to instructional design, is to develop learning experiences in a continual design-evaluation cycle that continues throughout the life of the project. This cycle, known as the spiral cycle or layered approach, is considered to be iterative, meaning that products are continually improved as they cycle continues. http://tc.eserver.org/31084.html http://tc.eserver.org/31084.html Lightweight literate programming (LLP) combines software documentation and coding in a way that can scaffold collaborations between technical communicators and programmers. We review the genesis and history of LLP, including its relationship to established single-sourcing methods. We then detail its use by programmers and discuss two models for writer/programmer collaboration using LLP. We finish by suggesting a few studies of working relationships between writers and programmers that LLP could facilitate. http://tc.eserver.org/31088.html http://tc.eserver.org/31088.html When everyone offers quality, quality no longer stands out. Businesses must look elsewhere for differentiation. The next arena for competition has become innovation. But there is little consensus on what innovation is and how to achieve it. http://tc.eserver.org/31069.html http://tc.eserver.org/31069.html Focus groups are a powerful means to evaluate services or test new ideas. Basically, focus groups are interviews, but of 6-10 people at the same time in the same group. One can get a great deal of information during a focus group session. http://tc.eserver.org/31040.html http://tc.eserver.org/31040.html Agile methodologies have had a lot of press in recent years. To listen to some people, agile methodologies are the answer to all the ailments that have ever plagued software development from the beginning of the computer age. But what are they, really? And do they really deliver on that promise? The answer is: (drumroll, please) it depends. http://tc.eserver.org/31003.html http://tc.eserver.org/31003.html QuikScan is a set of summarizing and highlighting techniques that enable readers to quickly find information in documents. The foremost goal of the QuikScan Project is to improve the quality of business meetings by supporting attendees who must deliberate over documents they may not have carefully read. We envision QuikScan as a new career path for professional editors. http://tc.eserver.org/30707.html http://tc.eserver.org/30707.html There's an irony about agile development. There is no hard evidence that it produces better software, faster. And formal adoption rates, admittedly hard to measure, don't reach the 20 percent mark. Yet the ideas that underpin agile development--defining requirements incrementally, writing software in short stints, seeking customer feedback, testing code as it's written, frequent builds--have caught on like wildfire. They are widely accepted as sound development practices, even among teams that have not formally adopted them. http://tc.eserver.org/30691.html http://tc.eserver.org/30691.html If you asked your students whether they'd rather listen to a lecture, take notes from PowerPoint slides, or work with classmates on a project, most would probably opt for the project. Although definitions vary, active learning strategies are classroom techniques that engage students with the subject they're studying by discussing it, writing about it, applying it in some meaningful context, or otherwise working it into the fabric of their own experience and prior knowledge. They become active creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients of information. http://tc.eserver.org/30680.html http://tc.eserver.org/30680.html Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) programming techniques are increasingly dominating the world of Web application development. New developers are stepping into the world of Ajax development every day, and they come from disparate development backgrounds. Part 1 of this multipart series gives you a cheat sheet of Ajax development resources from an expert team of Ajax developers at IBM(R). The authors draw from their own ramp-up experiences to help you with practical information that will put you on a fast track to effective Ajax development. http://tc.eserver.org/30638.html http://tc.eserver.org/30638.html Creating a product that has a logical information structure is critical to the success of the product. A good structure helps users find information and accomplish their tasks with ease. Card sorting is one method that can help us understand how users think the information and navigation should be within a product. http://tc.eserver.org/30591.html http://tc.eserver.org/30591.html It is important for us to gain knowledge about our audiences before we start developing our information packages. It is equally important for us to get feedback after we have produced our information so that we know how well it was received by our audiences. http://tc.eserver.org/30565.html http://tc.eserver.org/30565.html The need for timely and relevant computer documentation is a constant challenge. Sometimes there is a need to redesign such documentation to make it more useful. Rhetorical analysis is a useful aid for technical communicators in redesigning such documentation. Using Kenneth Burke’s notion of terministic screens, a quick reference aid for the users of a machine-aided translation system is examined from the perspective of graphic communication. Although rhetorical analysis cannot replace accepted principles of good design, it allows the technical communicator to examine design decisions from another perspective, giving one a very different set of questions to consider and some principles of explanation to justify design decisions. http://tc.eserver.org/30510.html http://tc.eserver.org/30510.html Keeping information metrics for documentation projects gives managers the ability to more accurately estimate future projects. Publications departments can develop their own tools or they can use existing tools to track such things as page size, hours-per-page spent writing, illustrating, editing, and producing manuals; and the dependencies of each manual. This kind of information can help to determine development schedules, show how late changes affect the documentation process, and accurately determine what it will take to complete quality documentation on time and within budget. http://tc.eserver.org/30466.html http://tc.eserver.org/30466.html This process provides a means for sound decision making to determine the who, what, when, where, why, and how of training. The concept of a system approach to training is based on obtaining an overall view of the training process. It is characterized by an orderly process for gathering and analyzing collective and individual performance requirements, and by the ability to respond to identified training needs. The application of a systems approach to training insures that training programs and the required support materials are continually developed in an effective and efficient manner to match the variety of needs in an ever rapidly changing environment. http://tc.eserver.org/30458.html http://tc.eserver.org/30458.html Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality. http://tc.eserver.org/30443.html http://tc.eserver.org/30443.html Demand Characteristics is a term used in Cognitive Psychology to denote the situation where the results of an experiment are biased because the experimenters' expectancies regarding the performance of the participants on a particular task create an implicit demand for the participants to perform as expected. http://tc.eserver.org/30445.html http://tc.eserver.org/30445.html The task-artifact cycle is in other words an iterative process of continuous, mutually dependent development between task and artifact, a process that will never reach an optimum state. http://tc.eserver.org/30436.html http://tc.eserver.org/30436.html User satisfaction and usefulness are measured using usability studies that involve real customers. Given the nature of software development and delivery, having to conduct usability studies can become a costly expense in the overall budget. A major part of this expense is the participant costs. Under this condition, it is desirable to reduce the number of participants without sacrificing the quality of the experiment. If a company could use a smaller participant pool and get the same results as the entire pool; this would result in significant savings. Given a participant pool of size N, is there a subset of N that would yield the same results as the entire population? This research addresses this question using a data-mining clustering tool called Applications Quest. http://tc.eserver.org/30415.html http://tc.eserver.org/30415.html Contextual Inquiry is a field research technique that focuses on interviewing users in their own context as they do actual work. As a basis for effective design, Contextual Inquiry can contribute to the requirements and structure of systems and information. This half-day workshop presents a practical introduction to Contextual Inquiry as a step in designing information that supports and extends users' work. http://tc.eserver.org/30405.html http://tc.eserver.org/30405.html The habit of collecting, analyzing, designing, and innovating in this fashion is making me a more systematic and disciplined web designer. Through analyzing the best design patterns and techniques used by today's web design community, I'm able to more critically assess my own designs, and create new solutions to common interface challenges. http://tc.eserver.org/30374.html http://tc.eserver.org/30374.html The computer industry is moving toward the adoption of the object-oriented approach as the standard mode of analyzing, designing, and implementing applications. This paper applies the new orientation to the task of simulating the traffic of people in a building. This paper is a primer to a new technology which promises to revolutionalize programming: object orientation. To make the presentation concrete, I will build it around a case history. Imagine that an architect asked you to create a simulation that will help her determine how many elevators anew building will need to keep the average wait for an elevator to, say, under thirty seconds. How would you go about this task? http://tc.eserver.org/30297.html http://tc.eserver.org/30297.html If you're just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does. However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do. http://tc.eserver.org/30268.html http://tc.eserver.org/30268.html The document development process is traditionally viewed as a series of steps along a single linear path. Instead, it is useful to view document development as consisting of activities along dual paths: one product-centered and one document-centered. Isolating a product-centered path reveals how much of your time is spent on activities other than writing--for example, learning about the product. It also highlights the ways in which the documentation is dependent on or shaped by the product. http://tc.eserver.org/30246.html http://tc.eserver.org/30246.html Observation is a way to gather rich information about how users work with software products that also provides a clearer understanding of the users' work. The method consists of watching users performing their normal work routine where they work. Observers can be usability professionals or trained individuals from the company. The richness and type of data collected can be used to identify design opportunities for the next release, define usability goals for all products, and create realistic customer scenarios. http://tc.eserver.org/30198.html http://tc.eserver.org/30198.html Testing 5-10 users at once lets you conduct large-scale usability testing and still meet your deadlines. http://tc.eserver.org/30164.html http://tc.eserver.org/30164.html Critical thinking pedagogy offers a supportive environment for teaching ethics in the professional communication classroom. Four important aspects of critical thinking which particularly encourage ethical thought and behavior are identifying and questioning assumptions, seeking a multiplicity of voices and alternatives on a subject, making connections, and fostering active involvement. Focusing on these behaviors allows an ongoing incorporation of ethics into many different aspects of the classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/30179.html http://tc.eserver.org/30179.html Project management is as much art as science. But even artists follow recognized approaches to creating their work, and they rely on practical tools to do so. Three elements of project management--regardless ofproject size or scope--will determine success: creative estimating; project planning; and effective tracking. These three elements don't need to be complex, and they don't need to be time consuming. Building a standard approach and simple, reusable tools can streamline the project management process with minimal overhead while assuring the necessary control. http://tc.eserver.org/30050.html http://tc.eserver.org/30050.html The System Usability Scale (SUS) was administered verbally to native English and non-native English speakers for several internally deployed applications. It was found that a significant proportion of non-native English speakers failed to understand the word 'cumbersome' in Item 8 of the SUS (that is, 'I found the system to be very cumbersome to use.') This finding has implications for reliability and validity when the questionnaire is distributed electronically in multinational usability efforts. http://tc.eserver.org/30006.html http://tc.eserver.org/30006.html Activity modeling is a systematic approach to organizing and representing the contextual aspects of tool use that is both well-grounded in an accepted theoretical framework and embedded within a proven design method. Activity theory provides the vocabulary and conceptual framework for understanding the human use of tools and other artifacts. Usage-centered design provides the methodological scaffolding for applying activity theory in practice. In this Technical Paper, activity theory and usage-centered design are outlined and the connections between the two are highlighted. Simple extensions to the models of usage-centered design are introduced that together succinctly model the salient and most essential features of the activities within which tool use is embedded. Although not intended as a tutorial, examples of Activity Maps, Activity Profiles, and Participation Maps are provided. http://tc.eserver.org/30015.html http://tc.eserver.org/30015.html Naked Objects, the latest incarnation of the persistent notion of object-oriented user interfaces, proposes to eliminate the need for visual and interaction design of user interfaces by always presenting users with unadorned domain objects in a standard form and by constraining all interaction to the same few interaction idioms. Such simplistic user interfaces can be generated automatically through a software framework. This article examines the likely impact of the Naked Objects approach in light of its strengths and shortcomings as well as its undeniable appeal to developers and decision makers seeking shortcuts to user interface design. The ultimate significance of Naked Objects may be in the lessons it offers for practicing professionals, lessons that highlight the need for empowering users as problem-solvers by giving them better tools that enable them to achieve diverse ends by diverse means. http://tc.eserver.org/30021.html http://tc.eserver.org/30021.html Essential use cases are abstract, lightweight, technology-free dialogues of user intentions and system responsibilities that effectively capture requirements for user interface design. Employing essential use cases in typical object-oriented development processes requires designers to translate them into conventional use cases, costing time, imposing rework, and delaying work on the object-oriented development until the user interface design is complete. We describe how essential use cases can drive object-oriented development directly, without any intervening translation, allowing user interface development to proceed in parallel. Working with essential use cases yields some unexpected further benefits: analysts can take advantage of recurring patterns in essential use cases, and the crucial common vocabulary of responsibilities lets designers trace directly from the essential use cases to the objects in their design. http://tc.eserver.org/30014.html http://tc.eserver.org/30014.html One of the main motivations for essential use cases was the context of user interface design. We, however, have been exploring the application of essential use cases in general object-oriented system development. Our experience has been very positive, and we found advantages to essential use cases that assist in both analysis and in design. This paper outlines two techniques involving essential use cases: use of role-play in requirements analysis, and distribution of system requirements from essential use cases to objects. http://tc.eserver.org/30007.html http://tc.eserver.org/30007.html User role models are compared in detail with the popular user modeling technique of personas. User roles offer a more compact, more focused means of capturing and exploring those aspects of users most relevant to interaction design. The advantages and limitations of the approaches are considered and a combined strategy is described. http://tc.eserver.org/29940.html http://tc.eserver.org/29940.html You do research to better understand your users, but exactly what is it that you want to find out about them? That's the first question you need to ask, and its answer dictates which research methods you should use, since specific methods are tailored to finding specific types of information. http://tc.eserver.org/29928.html http://tc.eserver.org/29928.html Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I've learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path. http://tc.eserver.org/29908.html http://tc.eserver.org/29908.html This is a brief overview of Six Sigma principles and an introduction to basic methods used in a Green Belt project in a technical publications department. This Green Belt project addressed the impact of declining return rates of technical reviews to both quality and cost. The author explains how the project originated and which Six Sigma methods were selected and implemented. She will review several examples of methods used to identify feasible solutions. The intended results of this project are to increase the return rate and, more importantly, to improve documentation quality and greatly reduce the department's cost of rework. http://tc.eserver.org/29813.html http://tc.eserver.org/29813.html When we ask designers what stage they spend the bulk of their time in when launching a product, the majority of designers answer, the Implementation Stage. However, our research shows that the teams launching the most usable products on schedule and on budget spend the bulk of their time in the Measure and Learn stage. http://tc.eserver.org/29804.html http://tc.eserver.org/29804.html This research investigates the impact of normative intensity (i.e., strength of feeling) and crystallization (i.e., level of agreement) regarding communication behaviors and perceptions of social sanctions. By adapting the return potential model originally set forth by Jay Jackson, the authors examine perceptions of communication behaviors as a normative opinion process. Telephone survey respondents were asked to offer their own personal opinions regarding several communicative behaviors. By calculating the normative power (NP = Normative Intensity × Crystallization) associated with each of these behaviors, predictions were made regarding the frequency of behavior. The authors also connect normative power with the social costs ascribed to acts falling outside the accepted realm of behavior. Results indicate that public opinion can be seen as a normative process in which the intensity and crystallization of the climate of opinion exert influence on behavior in various communication situations. http://tc.eserver.org/29808.html http://tc.eserver.org/29808.html Identifying the approach used by those revision experts par excellence--that is, professional editors--should enable researchers to better grasp the revision process. To further explore this hypothesis, the author conducted research among professional editors, six of whom she filmed as they engaged in their practice. An analysis of their work approach strategies showed their detection strategies to consist in anticipating errors and in comparing the author's text with the editor's knowledge, which appears in a range of states: certitude, uncertainty, and ignorance. Furthermore, the participating editors used problem-solving strategies to automatically solve more than half of the problems encountered in the text. Otherwise, they used immediate or postponed strategies. This description of professional editors in action opens a number of avenues for the further research and development of in-class instruction of self-revision and professional editing. http://tc.eserver.org/29621.html http://tc.eserver.org/29621.html Participatory communication is most often applied to development communications--a field of practice rooted in the modernization efforts of the U.S. post World War II. Similar to participatory design, popular definitions and models of participatory communication provide a lens through which the efficacy of user-centered communications may be viewed. At Indiana University, we have had success in increasing the usability and usefulness of communication products by including end users, their advocates, and related stakeholders in cross-functional teams. The adoption of new systems used at Indiana University was fueled by communications strategies, plans, and products that resulted from a participatory approach. http://tc.eserver.org/29636.html http://tc.eserver.org/29636.html Usability testing doesn't come cheap. You can however, follow test models that will help you improve the quality of your products, including websites. Usability professionals agree that some testing is better than none, and traditional formal usability testing can be adapted to fit your needs and your budget. This paper discusses how all four of these methods: low-cost usability testing, heuristic evaluations, expert reviews, and checkpoints in the development process were used to analyze subsites and applications at a federally funded public health website. http://tc.eserver.org/29869.html http://tc.eserver.org/29869.html This paper discusses the processes used to develop two online STC surveys: the 'Employment and Salary Survey' conducted by the STC Carolina Chapter, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and the 'Member Survey' conducted by the STC Usability SIG. Both surveys were available during the winter of 2003. This paper also highlights results from these surveys to demonstrate findings that online surveys can provide. Throughout this paper, we offer suggestions that other groups can apply to their survey efforts, including working methods to employ, types of questions to ask, ways to increase response rates, and approaches to verify and describe the respondent sample. http://tc.eserver.org/29623.html http://tc.eserver.org/29623.html Eye tracking (ET) is a technique for capturing eye movements as a person looks at a computer interface. It provides insight into where a person is looking, for how long, and in what order. In usability testing, ET can help testers evaluate the quality of a website or software design based on the user’s eye activity. In this paper, we introduce you to ET and its application in usability. We identify questions that ET can answer, describe how it works, summarize some of the research in ET, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks in usability testing. with an eye tracker for usability testing. This process is specific to the ET hardware (ERICA) and software (GazeTracker) used in the Laboratory of Usability Testing in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington (UWTC LUTE). http://tc.eserver.org/29549.html http://tc.eserver.org/29549.html What is a behavioral interview? Behavioral based interviewing is interviewing based on discovering how the interviewee acted in specific employment-related situations. The logic is that how you behaved in the past will predict how you will behave in the future i.e. past performance predicts future performance. http://tc.eserver.org/29510.html http://tc.eserver.org/29510.html Personas are detailed descriptions of imaginary people constructed out of well-understood, highly specified data about real people. We believe that when you use data to create personas, and use personas in a thoughtful way during the product development process, you will: increase your product's usability, utility, and general appeal; streamline your team's processes and improve your colleagues' abilities to work together; enable your company to make business decisions that help both your company and your customers; improve your company's bottom line. http://tc.eserver.org/29473.html http://tc.eserver.org/29473.html Words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype. http://tc.eserver.org/29475.html http://tc.eserver.org/29475.html The individual components of a persona are described and an example persona relating to the SecureCam case study is provided. http://tc.eserver.org/29474.html http://tc.eserver.org/29474.html I feel that creation of user persona is nothing but realistic stereotyping or a simplified outline of the user. The word 'realistic' is more important as realism can be achieved only through user study. (I am not referring to the fictional personas applicable in futuristic technologies). Humorists, cartoonists and filmmakers are gifted with the art of stereotyping. But they tend to exaggerate a lot. Therefore the personalities they render appear like caricatures. We must avoid caricatured user personas. While stereotyping, you generalize and oversimplify. And when you do that you pick or eliminate some details. That makes all the difference. http://tc.eserver.org/29464.html http://tc.eserver.org/29464.html More than most people, technical communicators are aware that if communication is not effective, conflicts can arise. Find out more about the Thomas-Kilmann conflict mode instrument (TKI) and how to identify your predominant conflict style. http://tc.eserver.org/29405.html http://tc.eserver.org/29405.html Open source software development is not just about providing the source code for your application. It is much more about building a community around a shared project. That takes time. I think the biggest myth about open source software is that you say 'hey, I'm open source now' and suddenly thousands of qualified people give up nights and weekends to work on your code. http://tc.eserver.org/29392.html http://tc.eserver.org/29392.html The STOP teams brilliant practical approach to outlining also looks forward to a number of activities that have become more convenient thanks to electronic outlining software--collaborative work on organization, visual display of a verbal structure, an iterative process of research, outlining, and drafting focused on the same document, and the large organizations need for standard templates defining the structure of generic modules. In these ways, the STOP team are forerunners for practices that even today are avant garde. http://tc.eserver.org/29403.html http://tc.eserver.org/29403.html This paper describes a cross-cultural field study of what people consider to be mobile essentials, how those mobile essentials are carried and problems typically encountered. http://tc.eserver.org/29369.html http://tc.eserver.org/29369.html Avoid looking too closely at the details when taking on a project. http://tc.eserver.org/29307.html http://tc.eserver.org/29307.html Here's how to apply the principles of a well-known productivity system to your creative process. The resulting creative habits can boost your design skills while they reduce stress and free your mind to tackle big problems.