You want to know what your users think? Integrate usability in your technical documentation process
- Workshop
- User Experience
- 25. September
- 09:00 - 10:30 AM (CEST)
-
Marion Wittkowsky
- Hochschule Flensburg
-
Lennard Friedrichs
Contents
Today, technical documentation is not only a lot of text and pictures in a monolithic manual. There are many ways to introduce new products and to instruct potential users. Sometimes multi-modal content is created for multi-media output to form some kind of user information. Or, the ways how to call the user's attention, for example where to get the desired information, vary. However, all the different options to inform the users follow their own rules and sometimes some of the users still require other types of information. The only way to find out what the users prefer, is to perform usability tests. These tests can either address as many users as possible, so-called quantity checks, or they are performed with a small group of users. The latter are called qualitative checks, where even more details with regard to the usage of a product may be gathered. In this workshop we will introduce some usability methods and work with example use cases where the participants may be integrated in the planning and reflection phases.
Takeaways
You will learn why a user-centred approach to create information products is worth the effort. In addition, we present usability testing methods that can easily be performed without auxiliary devices.