Documentation doesn’t need a full-blown usability test, lab with one-way mirror and all, but it should have something. That’s one thing I’ve been working on this week with a particular help system I described in my last post.

When doing usability testing on documentation, keep the following things in mind. (These apply to any type of usability testing, actually.)

  1. The participant isn’t being tested—the documentation is. Make this clear to the participant. You may even want to put it as simply as, “You’re not being tested. I am.” You want to observe how a person interacts with the content. The participant will face no adverse consequences for not successfully completing a task.
  2. Come up with scenarios and tasks where the context makes sense to the users. Similar to examples used in documentation, if the situations you present don’t make sense in the participant’s world, she’ll spend time getting confused or correcting you. Think through the context of the tasks you’re using to be sure it holds up.
  3. The participant should speak out loud so you can record thoughts, feelings, and reactions. It’s okay in informal testing to ask, “What are you thinking right now?” or “Why did you choose that option?”
  4. Any pause in movement of more than a couple of seconds means the user has to ponder what to do. That suggests a potential usability problem.
  5. Put together follow-up questions to find out how the participant feels after interacting with the documentation. Of course, you’re looking for objective data and observations; however, one of the important things to find out is the impressions the participant comes away with regarding the documentation and the product. Those impressions could very well affect how much the person wants to have anything to do with your organization and its products.
  6. It’s okay for the participant to give up. People do that. Explain this to the participant. Usability testing is about seeing whether people can complete tasks successfully most of the time (or ideally, all of the time). You may wonder whether telling the user that she can give up is somehow planting that idea in her mind. But if the person were on her own and trying to use the documentation, she would think of giving up just as quickly.

Related entries (auto-generated):

Documentation Needs Usability Testing, Too

Findings from an Online Help Usability Test

Some Observations from Documentation Usability Testing

Where Usability and Documentation Meet

Testing Documentation on Co-workers: Part One