Chapter 9 Ensuring Usability
Characterizing Usability
The goal of usability is to place user concerns, rather than text features, at the center of the design and development processes. Usability responds to the needs, goals, skills, and contexts of people who are completing a process or using a product.
Definition of Usability
In technical communication, usability is the degree to which texts, regardless of their materiality or mode, effectively and easily enable people to accomplish their goals.
Critical Principals
Usability is guided by five critical principals that can be applied to many types of print and electronic texts, oral presentations, and visual.
Learnability
How easily can people learn to use the text and the product?
Efficiency
How productive are people using the text and the product?
Memorability
How well do people remember how to use the text and the product from one use to the next?
Error Recovery
How many errors do people make using the text and the product?
How serious are the errors and how Quickly can users correct them?
Satisfaction
How satisfied are people with the performance of the text and the product? Do they enjoy using them?
Characterizing Usability Testing
Definition of Usability Testing
Usability testing is a structured process that gathers information about specific use from people similar to the intended users.
Purposes
Usability testing has both immediate and long term purposes. the immediate purposes is to identify problems prior to the release of a text so the problems can be fixed. a long term purpose is to maintain a historical record of test results and benchmarks that can be referenced during development.
Quality Standards
Usability testing is one method of ensuring high-quality texts. When a text is not usable, various kinds of minor, moderate, or severe problems result. Minor problems probably irritate users, but they do not actually delay the completion of the task, but users usually can develop workarounds.
Limitations
Testing results are only as good as the tests; they can be accurate but not necessarily representative. When you're designing a test, you need to consider these limitations:
Test participants
Test situation
Test techniques
Testing procedures
Benefits
Everyone involved in the design and development of technical communication- writers, designers, editors, prepares technicians, print/production managers agrees that test taking takes time. The benefits, though are undeniable, because a well-planned usability testing program can provide invaluable information for revising and editing communication.
Types of Usability Testing
Organizations must make testing part of their process development and production schedules, or it simply will not get done. As the value of testing becomes more widely recognized, more organizations are employing some kind of testing. In the long run, testing during development and revision is much more cost effective than dealing with the results of poor communication. There are three broad categories of testing text-based, expert-based, and user based testing - are distinguished by the ways the information is collected and by the nature of the feedback.
Text-Based Testing
People doing text-based testing examine a range of local-level language, visual, and design features and then draw conclusions about changes that are necessary to improve the text's accessibility and comprehensibility. Several simple text-based tests for consistency can be performed at any time in the developmental process on selected pages or individual documents using word- processing software such as Microsoft Word.
Expert-Based Testing
Expert-based testing includes several kinds of reviews: technical reviews by subject-matter experts, substantive editorial reviews and design reviews. Expert-based testing is particularly useful for assessing technical accuracy and also for selecting supporting evidence and for identifying the level of detail for the intended audience.
Creating a usability testing plan
Before starting the testing process, define the broad goals and scope of your testing plan and determine what types of usability test will best meet your goals, when they should be conducted, and how the results will be reported and used.
User Analysis
Many users have significantly different skills, attitudes, expectations, and experiences than the writers and designers. What do you need to know about your users, and how do you find out?
Task Analysis
Once you have completed a preliminary user analysis, select representative users who fit the profile of your target audiences and begin assessing the task in which they are involved.
Locate Representative Test Participants
Locate and schedule participants for your test. If you have completed user and task analyses, your user profile should identify test participants who are representative of the intended users.
Develope strategies and pilot test for inquiry
Develop a list of questions, scenarios, and key points that you want to explore during testing.
Identify and Prepare a test location and materials
Find an appropriate place to conduct test that is free from serious distractions or interruptions and keep the setting of the evaluation informal and comfortable. Make sure the space you choose is large enough to accommodate both test participants and test administrators without making anyone uncomfortable
Explain the Test Procedures to Participants
You should consider the value of writing an introductory script summarizing the test purposes and procedures that can be explained by a test administrator or read individually by the participants.
Conduct the test
While the duration of the user-based test depends on the complexity of the communication you're testing, individual tests generaaly range from about 20 to 90 minutes.
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16 comments:
I think usability is a very important consideration in the prepartation of instructions, web pages, and technical documents. There are too many times I have been on these fancy looking web sites that make no sense and are difficult to find things. I feel unless a usability test has been performed, web sites should be kept as simple as possible. Jackie's presentation on usability was very informative and was very similar to this chapter. Before her presentation the whole concept was new to me.
I think that this chapter was summed up very well. I think that ensuring usability in anything should always be considered. There are always times where I am trying to read some document for class and I have no idea what it is telling me. It has big words that I don't understand. There are also times on certain websites that actually getting the answer to my quesiton is like pulling teeth. I sometimes get frustrated becuase it seems whenever I click on a link that seems like the answere to a question I have it redirects me to some other place. It is always nice to have information that is easy to get at as well as easy to understand.
Usability is something that an engineer doesn't understand. cars are designed(engineered)by a group of individuals who will never work on one. When I worked on airplanes we felt the same way. They were designed by people who would never work on one. Consequently the mechanics hated the engineers. Jackie talked about it and that was a good thing. Having it reafirmed by Burnett was good too. I feel we applied this to our city appeal very well.
It is always important to ensure usability of your technical documents. This chapter discusses some of the strategies to use to ensure usability by doing a usability testing. I have had so many experiences especially using manuals, software platforms and websites where by you search for information or try to follow the instruction given and don't do any good. One example was an instruction manual i received when i bought my laptop. My laptop has a 64 bit processor, which means I can run both 32 bit and 64 bit operating system and applications. When i ordered the laptop it shipped with windows xp x64. The instructions manual that i received had instructions for windows xp 32 bit and also the drivers in the disk were all 32 bit. Recently i had some problems and had to re-install the OS a fresh. When it was time to install drivers it was in vain. They did not note anywhere in the manual that the drivers were 32 bit and that i couldn't use that disk for the x64 OS. This chapter is so important whether it's creating technical documents or designing new products. Taylor did a very good job.
I think this chapter was one of the more difficult chapters to understand. When dealing with usability everything should be taken into consideration. I understand the section far to well when it explains how people sometimes read something and it just goes in and out and you dont understand it. It is even worse when your looking through a peice of information and you can not find it any where. I think this chapter is important to understand because it important to comprehend information as easily as you can.
This is a very good chapter. This is well summed up. Usability should be taken in to consideration. It is hard to know what is going to be usable and what is not going to be. I think that a lot of things don’t go through this kind of testing and that is why it doesn’t come out like it should or as user friendly as it should be.
Usability testing is too overlooked in today's world. There are so many things out there that are very confusing for so many. While it make work well for the business, it is problematic for the consumer. This can be an easy cause of revenue and customer loss.
I feel that usability a very important when it comes to the design of instructions and technical documents. I feel that sometime designers pay to much attention to the appearance of the document, trying to make it pretty and pay less attention to whether or not the document flows well and if the information is easy to find. I think that a lot of documents get too cluttered, and that people need to realize that they aren’t in an art contest and sometimes simple is better.
Usability is really important in technical communication, it’s true that a lot of times the documents or manuals focuses on design and layout but is hard to understand and use the product. I think the manuals should be easy to understand rather than good looking. I have had this kind of problem so many times when I buy new appliances, which comes with manuals whose meaning is unclear. I think usability testing is something that should never be skipped. The chapter is well summarized and makes more clear about the usability.
Usability is always a common goal in every field. In construction, the field of my choice, we work with many different products. Many of these we use on a consistent basis. So the directions on and with the products becomes very important for our employees. When reading through direction certain items should stick in your mind and stand out on the product. Then the product has to be easily used, there can not be difficult processes or consumers will find different products to use. Also, in construction we use all different types of equipment. This equipment needs to be easily operated and efficient. The same applies for documents, they need to be easily read and understood to make them practical.
this is a chapter that alot of companies should look at for making their websites more user friendly. i hate when i am looking for certain information on a certain web page and i just cant figure out how to get to or access the information. i dont think that it would be very hard to have a site and make it easy to fin what ever you are looking for fairley easy.
Usability is the key factor that every field should have in their instruction. Like in every website there should be usability test which make them better. But many of site are useless to see that nothings make sense. Like we see in the manual of many product that we can't get full through it.So we get confuse to use it.Therefore, these things should be easy to understand.
Usability testing isn't something that I usually think about but it does make a lot of sense. If someone writes a set of instructions and does not find out if someone who does not know how to perform the given task can figure it out, it could be unsuccessful. One example is when we did our writing instructions with a visual in this class. I tested my instructions out on someone else who had never done the given task before. My instructions were successful because the person was able to figure it out on the first try.
I think usability should be at the top of the list when preparing for any project. If the project is hard to understand or use then it was just a waste of time because no one is going to want to work with it.
usabilty is something that has to be in the back of your mind when you create anything. from building a set of stairs, to setting up a good web site. some web sites these days are useless due to the crap that is all over them, you can't find exactly what you need. usability testing can play a major role in making things usable. i thinkn this chapter summary was well done by taylor
Everything that should be presented should go through usability test. Usability is the degree to which texts, regardless of their materiality or mode, effectively and easily enable people to accomplish their goals. There are five critical points for it : learnability, efficiency, memorability, error recovery, and satisfaction.
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