This truth I know to be self-evident: a well-written user guide is a not a solution for a poorly designed product. The user guide might win an award in an STC publication competition, but users will not buy a product that is not easy to use.
Because you create documentation from an end-user perspective, an understanding of usability provides an insight into how users perform their tasks. This goes a long way in making the documents user-friendly to them. It is essential for you to understand the importance of good design.
To be a user advocate, sometimes the only advocate on the team, it is especially important to have a good grounding in usability principles so that the product design achieves the balance between efficiency and desirability. A good place to learn about usability is the User and User Experience (UUX) SIG. The UUX SIG has an archive of articles about the software development process, usability testing, focus groups, and book reviews on a wide range of usability topics.
There are a number of ways that you can promote usability:
- Get involved early in the development process and speak on behalf of the users;
- Volunteer to review GUI literals, error messages, menus, dialog boxes, and textual content;
- Volunteer to facilitate usability testing to collect feedback from actual users so that you can baseline how the product or system is developing and how it is meeting the users’ needs;
- Ask questions of people in the profession. Do not assume they do not have the time to talk to you, especially when you took the time to buy their book or attend their seminar.
If the outcome of your effort is lower-than-expected calls to the help desk and fewer complaints from frustrated users, and if the user community praises the product for simple and effective design, you have done your job.
See yesterday’s blog post about user experience and accessibility sessions at the Summit, and speak with the members of the usability profession.
I’m David Dick and I’m talking usability.