I recently held some informal usability testing for some changes to an online help system I was considering. Because I hadn’t done any testing on the original help, I incorporated some of that as well. Doing so pretty much confirmed that I was on the right track with the changes I wanted to make. The help as it stood wasn’t very usable.

All documentation can stand some usability testing. We technical communicators like to claim that we’re user focused and user advocates. I like to believe that myself. However, sometimes we can be more like developers than we want to admit. We do things our way, the way we think is best. We may have even proved in the past that what we’re doing is pretty user-friendly. But times—and users—change.

Most of the big trends in technical communication have to do with the information developer’s side of things: DITA, content management systems, structured authoring, single sourcing…. An emerging discussion of collaborative authoring between technical writers, SMEs, and other team members is moving toward what I think we should focus more on, which is how the users get their information. Of course, wikis have been a big topic lately, but we don’t talk about changing how users get answers much beyond that.

In my opinion, this usual focus on information developer processes is the reason why, as a whole, we’re still using things like FrameMaker and help authoring tools. The deliverables that come from these tools generally don’t reflect how people look for information. If we make a big enough fuss about what we really want, maybe tech comm vendors would respond and give us platforms like WordPress or wikis that you don’t have to be a genius to launch but allow for collaboration and customization.

Whatever platform you choose to deliver on, ultimately, usability should be a big concern. Documentation that’s not usable will not encourage people to use it, and we regularly return to the question of how to draw people into the docs to begin with. Even those who dare to use the docs will flee when they encounter difficulty getting answers.

Possibly because I’ve been thinking about usability lately, I signed up for the Usability and User Experience Special Interest Group (UUX SIG). I used to belong to the Instructional Design and Learning SIG, but unfortunately, I don’t do enough instructional design to get as much out of it as I otherwise could. We’ll see how it goes with the UUX SIG this year.

Related entries (auto-generated):

Six Things to Remember in Your Documentation Usability Testing

Some Observations from Documentation Usability Testing

Where Usability and Documentation Meet

Testing Documentation on Co-workers: Part One

Why a Transition from Tech Comm to Usability Makes Sense