Subscribe to the Journals Early on in our marriage, my wife and I listened to a set of CDs (a wedding gift) from a series of seminars by John Lund, a marriage counselor. Based on years of experience, he had developed the axiom, “Frustration is caused by unmet expectation.”
Now, just think about that statement for a minute in any context you choose. I suddenly recalled this axiom recently when talking with a coworker about a help system I had built and written, and it hit me that in user experience and documentation design, they are words to live by.
I don’t think there’s a computer user alive who has never felt frustrated about one thing or another in connection with that machine. Even if you swear by Macs, they do malfunction. Sometimes your software application won’t do what you want it to, or you can’t find the how-tos in the documentation.
The technology industry is driven by innovation, so it goes without saying that users are going to encounter new things. People will give you some slack on that. And to some extent, user expectation is dictated by what’s available. It’s partially driven by conventions and past experience. The keys on your computer keyboard are arranged in a certain way because that’s how typewriters were arranged. People expected to be able to type on a computer the same way they typed on typewriters.
Similarly, documentation users expect a table of contents, a search feature (if the output is electronic), an index, and so forth. How much of that comes from the fact that this is all that most people have ever seen? How much is driven by user research?
The fact remains that if your user doesn’t encounter what he expects in your documentation, he gets frustrated. He remembers that, and he’s less likely to use the documentation in the future. If he can get the results he wants from Google, then he’ll turn there from now on.
My point is something we’ve heard more than once but may not practice: Get in touch with some of your users and find out what they expect. What do they want out of your documentation? Usability testing is invaluable in getting this kind of information, but if you don’t have the means to arrange that kind of study, do what you can to contact a few users. Let them tell you what they expect.
The wider your user base, the more varied and harder to accommodate the feedback will be. But if you can satisfy at least some of the expectations, you reduce the likelihood and frequency of user frustration.
Just remember as you plan your documentation’s presentation and content: “Frustration comes from unmet expectation.”
I think I just found a great team cheer.
Related entries (auto-generated):
Consider Users’ Environment as Part of User Experience
Writer-Dictated vs. User-Dictated Experience
Technical Communicators as a Point of Contact between Users and Project Teams
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