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

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

Message Severity Levels: How Much Is Enough?

This article describes how we investigated software message severity levels using surveys in a series of usability tests and how the results helped us create a standard set of severity levels. These findings can also be applied to other messages.

Schwirzke, Martin and Mayuresh Ektare. Usability Interface (2003). Articles>Usability>Risk Communication

Methods and Guidelines to Avoid Common Questionnaire Bloopers

Over the years, I’ve often heard colleagues say 'let’s throw a questionnaire together and find out what our users think about our product.' Implicit in this statement is the assumption that questionnaires are easy to design, administer, and analyze. This assumption is far from the truth.

Wilson, Chauncey E. Usability Interface (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys

Million Dollar Web Usability Tips

What has long been a struggle for UEX professionals can actually be a great tool to demonstrate the importance of your role. We have found a way, using tools that you may already have, to support the users' needs that can positively impact your company’s bottom line.

Remus, Jacqueline and Jessyca Frederick. Usability Interface (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Experience

Mobile Phone Games Designed for Girls

Unlike many game developers, one company creates games primarily targeted at young women and girls. MiniFizz is certainly not just a traditional boys’ game painted pink.

Allaeys, Sabine. Usability Interface (2004). Articles>User Centered Design>Wireless Web>Games

Moving from Documenation to Usability: The Dangerfield Effect

I didn't consciously decide to transition from technical communication to usability specialist. I've always had an interest in making learning and performing as efficient, effective, and enjoyable as possible, and the move was a natural outgrowth of what I was doing in the technical communication world. Let me share with you some knowledge I gained while going through the transition process.

Miller, Dick. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability

Musing on Metrics: Why Measure Usablity?

ISO defines usability as 'a measure of the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve goals in a particular environment.' To those of us who are interested in documentation quality metrics, this definition is marvellous. We quibble over what typeface maximizes readability, and to what extent readability affects quality, but there’s no arguing with the value of reducing time to task completion. Usability testing closes the loop in the product development cycle; without it, development can spiral off in the wrong direction. Upcoming revisions to the ISO quality standards not only incorporate usability as a quality requirement but also mandate its measurement. To me, usability is an excellent working definition of product quality, and the field of usability is rich in metrics. The briefest web search yields dozens of metrics, such as time to completion of a task, percentage of tasks completed without errors, number of commands or keystrokes or mouse clicks used.

Jong, Steven F. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability

New Accessible Web Design Program at Northeastern University

Web accessibility is a hot topic, and now there is a brand new place to gain the knowledge and credentials you need to succeed in this increasingly important field. Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts-- already well known for its technical writing program-- is now offering a graduate certificate program in Interactive Design. This new program, one of the first in its kind, focuses specifically on topics surrounding web accessibility and design for interactive media of all kinds.

Gardner, P.J. and Lori Gillen. Usability Interface (2003). Academic>Accessibility>Education

Notes on Moving from a Character Cell to GUI

For things like order-entry or general form input, some of the attributes of windowing applications can get in the way. If you are designing a windowing application for frequent form-based input/modification, you want really good keyboard capabilities, an absence of windows popping around, a minimum of keyboard mouse transitions, etc. The guidelines for Windows design don't really deal well with form design and high-frequency data input and modification.

Wilson, Chauncey E. Usability Interface (1998). Articles>Usability>Online

Observing Users Who Listen to Web Sites

In this article we focus on the first of these goals and give you some of the fascinating findings about how vision-impaired users work with web sites.

Redish, Janice C. 'Ginny' and Mary Frances Theofanos. Usability Interface (2003). Design>Usability>Methods

Online Help - Too Much of a Good Thing?

Online help was originally thought of as an independent support system. It allows the user to access information easily and immediately, whenever it is needed. As such, it was thought to be the most often used support system on a user’s computer. However, from a number of sources, we have learned that online help is used less frequently than we originally thought. Usability tests, especially on web applications, often show that users do not use the online help; or if they do, they do not find the required information. Field engineers and customer support representatives often report that they need to explain information that is documented in the help because users do not use it. To provide more effective assistance, we must answer the question: 'Why is online help not used?'

Parush, Avi and Debi Kaporovsky Parush. Usability Interface (2001). Articles>Documentation>Help

Optimizing System Usability Without Re-Design

Projects critical to the missions of business organizations fail, devastating operations as well as IS budgets. Other systems are created or purchased at great cost only to be underutilized or plagued with non-standard 'work-arounds' that undermine the core efficiencies of the system. Fortunately, many of these systems can be recovered. They are technically adequate and potentially usable. User’s perceptions that they are unusable can be changed* through a multifaceted intervention process that we call Mission Critical System Optimization.

Orr, M. David. Usability Interface (1998). Articles>Usability>User Interface

Review: Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces

If you want to learn about paper prototyping from a renowned practitioner then I highly recommend Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder. Snyder advocates paper prototyping because it’s easy to design (requires minimal drawing skills), cheap to create (needs only paper and markers), and offers and opportunity for developers and users to evaluate design concepts. If you wonder where the beginning of the design process starts, it begins when great minds meet and brainstorm ideas, and drawing is a natural approach to illustrate them.

Dick, David J. Usability Interface (2004). Resources>Reviews>Workflow

Review: The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design

The Persona Lifecycle describes the value of personas, and offers detailed techniques and tools to conceive, create, communicate, and use personas to create [great] product designs. John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin provide examples, samples, and illustrations for persona practitioners to imitate and model. It is important to emphasize that the use of personas is a method that compliments other user-centered design techniques, including user testing, scenario-based design, and cognitive walkthroughs.

Dick, David J. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Reviews>User Centered Design>Personas

Personas and the Technical Communicator

What's the problem with personas? They're a new concept to many communicators, and thus sufficiently unfamiliar to make them difficult to use. To help solve this problem, I developed a couple of personas to show you how it's done, and illustrate their implications for documentation.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Usability Interface (2006). Articles>TC>User Centered Design>Personas

Philadelphia: User Experience Beyond The Web

Because many of the local Usability Professionals Association (UPA) members work in internet-related fields, Philadelphia's second Annual World Usability Day looked to broaden horizons by focusing on 'User Experience Beyond the Web.' The pervasive theme of the presentations by Hal Rosenbluth, James Mitchell, and Stephen Wilcox was that we actually have a lot in common.

Madaio, Mike. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Usability>User Experience

'Polite, Personable' Error Messages

I've spent most of my career in small software companies. My last two development groups didn't have the funds required to 'personalize' their interfaces with animated characters or even multimedia. And the error messages were already scheduled to be reviewed by a writer. If TME's findings were even partly right, I could potentially produce improvements in the way users perceived the software, with no additional expenditure.

Chatelaine, Julianne. Usability Interface (1998). Articles>Usability

The Politics of Usability: The Importance of Users in Product Design

Usability is political. The travel agent battling with an online booking system. The pensioner struggling to use an ATM. The telephone caller lost in the voice-prompt-maze of a computerised answering system. These people exemplify an underclass of end-users forced to interact with technology during their working and private lives.

McCoy, Thomas. Usability Interface (2002). Articles>Usability>Theory

Position Paper on the Suitability to Task of Automated Utilities for Testing Web Accessibility Compliance

Automated tools can make our jobs significantly easier, more thorough, and more cost effective. But, they are only the first necessary step in addressing accessibility-removing the barriers. We must now address the special condition of usability related to handicapped users and accept that user-based evaluation is the only true test of success.

Killam, Bill and Bill Holland. Usability Interface (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility

The Power of Storytelling

How Community Manager Karen Bachmann has learned about the power and importance of storytelling, and some of the many stories that have deeply affected her.

Bachmann, Karen L. Usability Interface (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods

Practical Use of Voice and Speech Recognition Software

Overall, I would say my experience with speech recognition software has its benefits–I had a goal to cut down my need to use the keyboard by 30 percent to 40 percent and that has certainly happened–along with a huge improvement in my hands, wrists, and shoulders. But I do suggest that at this stage of the technology, people interested in using speech recognition software have tremendous patience.

Mosher, Vannesa. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability

A Profile of Technical Communicators in Usability

At the STC 1998 Annual Conference, attendees of usability related sessions participated in a survey investigating some of the issues involved in making the transition from technical writing to usability. We were interested in exploring what skills writers bring from their current job in technical writing, which they believe they are missing ,and how they are acquiring them. Most of the 67 participants in the survey (82%) are full time technical writers. The businesses represented range from finance to engineering; however, 45% are in the software industry. The companies themselves tend to be large: over half have 1000 or more employees, 25% are mid-sized with 100–1000, and 22% are smaller.

Quesenbery, Whitney and Helena Mentis. Usability Interface (2000). Articles>Usability

Promoting Usability at Lucent Technologies

We sponsored an award to raise awareness of the importance of usability. Instead of focusing on what projects had done wrong with regard to usability, we decided to reward a project for doing things right!

Coyle, Cheryl L. and Karen L. Ziech. Usability Interface (2006). Articles>Usability>Case Studies