The goal of usability is to place user concerns, rather than text features, at the center of the design and development process. This chapter is about how easy users can interact with a document. Usability is the degree to which texts, regardless of their material or mode, effectively and easily enable people to accomplish their goals. There are five critical principles of usability, and those are learn ability, efficiency, memorability, error recovery, and satisfaction. You can test the usability of your document measuring the degree in which users can effectively and easily enable people to accomplish their goals. The tests tend to be inaccurate because you can never test every circumstance. If you test a document by using text-based testing, you would examine a range of local-level language, visual, and design features and than draw conclusions, and figure out what you need to change. If you use expert-based testing, you are using several kinds of reviews, such as reviews from subject matter experts, substantive editorial reviews, and possibly design reviews.
Information from users as they read and use a text is called concurrent testing. Information after they finished a text is retrospective testing. As you plan your usability testing, consider the following issues: goals, criticality, constraints, schedule, involvement, timing, goodness of fit, ease of use, usable form, and updating. When designing documents, web sites, and software interfaces you often have to focus on content, design prefaces, and perceptions of the task or activity that the communication is meant to be for. After all of the issues are considered, implementing the test plan is the next step. Locating participants, developing strategies for inquiry, figuring out the test locating, explaining the test to the participants, and conducting the test are the main point to make sure you do in the testing process. Then you must report the test results.
19 comments:
Usability is a key factor in technical document. If the document is impossible to read or understand it is no use to the reader. There have been many times where I have come across documents that are almost impossible to use. At my job I must look up parts in books. Sometimes the books are poorly organized and the information is difficult to find. Also computer software is very difficult to use. They are not very efficient and it is difficult to recover for some errors. There are a lot of technical documents where user ability was not considered a lot. Usability of a document is very important, because it allows the reader to get the most out of the document.
I think we got a good lesson in usability when we did our instructions assignment. I am sure that for all of us, our written instructions made perfect sense. However, that may not have been the case when we had a partner read them over and attempt to perform the given task. It was important for us to take note of each tiny little step that needed to be done in order to complete the task because it was not our brains (who knew the task well) that was going to follow those instructions. Remembering the key principles of usability discussed in this chapter can help achieve that success.
This wasn't my favorite chapter to read. I thought that it was a little confusing to understand. The summary was well written and explained things a little better for me to understand. I think that it is very important for a reader to interact and understand the material they are reading. If the reader doesn't understand or what they are reading doesn't make sense, then the information won't help the reader at all. It is a little useless for a reader to not understand or interpret the information they are reading, then there is no reason for them to even read it. In the past sometimes when I have read instructions for something or read a paper and didn't understand what I was reading, then I thought that it was useless for me to continue. Writers need to be careful to interact with their work and make sure they are thinking of the readers.
Usability can be one of the determining factors in whether your document fails or succeeds. You must test your results with effective planning, implementation and evaluation. A well planned usability testing program can provide invaluable information for revising and editing communication. Successful testing looks for unrecognizable problems so they can be eliminated. For a class last semester I had to research and report on the various health club and exercise facilities available to the city of Mankato. Then this information was going to be put on a website for people to use. I had to make sure my info was correct so that when people did look up this info that they were not getting wrong info when looking for exercise facilities.
Usability of a document is the most important part. If the document you created cannot be easily understood and used by the reader the reader will not want to read it. If the reader does not want to read your article or paper then you cannot share the information properly. Our instruction assignment was a very good example of this, writing the instructions you knew what you were talking about and can take advantage of having knowledge in the subject but if someone need instructions they probably would not know a lot about the topic. Skipping even small steps will make the document unusable.
This chapter was about usability, but with how it was written you would not think that is what they were talking about. The chapter was written in confusing language and was hard to understand what their main point was. From what I got from the chapter it is important to keep papers and any documents you write readable and understandable to whomever is viewing it. I think usability is very important because just like this chapter it is hard to comprehend what it is trying to tell you.
Usability is very important in any electronic or paper document. Usability of document should have some way of appealing to the audience and this chapter just emphasizes about it very well.
Whats the point of writing a document when very few people could comprehend it and utilize it. You alway have to wonder whether if the documents is going to work for the people whenever creating a document.
This chapter probably relates to people who are not familiar with technical communication more than any other chapter we have read. It deals with one of the most basic questions: Can the user understand it? From a writer standpoint, you know that no one is going to want to read your document if it isn’t useful to them. This chapter helps you understand that you need to make your document user friendly for your target audience. This can be used in any job field that you end up in. It is key for everyone to fully understand this chapter in order to make your presentations/ documents affective.
Usability is a very important element to address and use when developing a project or design. Usability style varies from person to person. For exmaple, I am currently enrolled in a class where the text book is divided in topics and subtopics. At first glance it is a great tool, but for me it is too busy. Information is pread throughout the book in a matter that I feel is unorganized. However, my classmates appear to learn a lot from the text. I have a different learning style then the others. For the windmill project, testing of the context and design is crucial. Our groups main goal will be to have a clear proposal and continuing to update our documents.
It is very important to put users needs first. There are five critical principles of usability, and those are learn ability, efficiency, memorability, error recovery, and satisfaction. As you plan your usability testing, consider the following issues: goals, criticality, constraints, schedule, involvement, timing, goodness of fit, ease of use, usable form, and updating. These two sentences really cover a lot of information. Each word explains a step or importance in usability. Reveiws are also important and that they have a wide variety of people looking over your project.
I thought this chapter was a little confusing. It was also alot of information to put into a summary. An example of when we had to use usability would be when we had to have someone read through of instuctions to make sure they were understandable. In most cases I do not think of usability when I am writing a document. I think that most people do not test their usability when they write a document. Although it is a good idea especially if it is an important document.
I, as well as many others, didn’t like this chapter that much. It was one of the most confusing ones so far. What I got out of the chapter is that usability helps people accomplish their goals and gives people an easy way to interact with a document. We all use usability in our daily lives from jumping onto the computer to check out our e-mail to chatting with friends on facebook. E-mail and facebook are just easy ways to communicate with others and to check out documents.
After reading this chapter and summary I had many questions and didn’t understand all the material being presented. In the summary of chapter nine they capture most of the key points. They stated the five critical principles of usability. This was important because it helps measure the degree to accomplish certain goals. They also explained each on of these principals in great detail for the reader. I think the most important issue is relaying the test plan. Testing these documents is being able to see if it passes. In conclusion, reading this chapter was difficult for me. However, I was able to grasp some key points like the five critical principals, and testing the plan to see if it works.
While all documents or presentations are created for some purpose sometimes their usability becomes overlooked. There are so many factors to consider when writing that I sometimes find myself not thinking of usability because the task of creating a well written document free of errors is so daunting all by itself. I think that usability is one area where having someone else read your document is greatly improved. This is because the test subject can give an outside look at the article and tell you if they understood the main point that you were trying to get across and if not you can revise and try again.
Usability is extremely important, especially in a technical communications document. I have always checked my work by having someone read thought it. I usually get feed back about that they think about the document and any corrections they would make to the document, grammatically or structurally. In this class we needed to have a person try our instructions in the instructions assignment before we handed it into Tesdell. I really liked the suggestions on making sure that the document teaches a person and that the document is memorable. I think that they better you test a document the more successful it will be.
Usability is a good lesion every technical writer should know. It can affect your document enough to make it either fail or succeed in helping a person understand your steps. This can be very hard when you’re trying to translate into another language. Because when you translate its hard to get the tiny little details into your directions. Those little details are very key to people who have little to no experience.
Chapter 9 is about ensuring usability. It particularly focuses on how easily and efficiently a user can interact with a document. Usability is the degree to which texts are effective and easy for people to accomplish their goals. It is very important for a document to be readable and usable. If is not then the ideas and information are not shared properly. There is no use of writing a document if they are not usable and understood by a major population. So making a document clear, using simple still explanatory text and trying to make it user friendly is the key to enhance the usability.
I think this summary is very well written. It covers the chapter well and highlights all of the main points. I think it is very important for a document to be very easy to read and understood by the audience. No one wants to read a paper that goes on forever from one topic to the next with no connection. It is a good idea to have a goal of what you want your document to say to the user and think about the most effective and simple way to get that across to them. This will make the document much more user friendly.
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