Many times when I think of surveys, I think of the Animaniacs cartoon with the ladies who asked the three Warner siblings, “Would you like to take a survey?” There followed many questions with every imaginable permutation based around George Wendt, movies, and bean-eating.

Recently I conducted an online survey on the training and help materials for System X, a Web-based app for office staff. I didn’t ask a single question about George Wendt or beans. My two main goals were:

1. Find out how good the training was that the respondents received in person
2. Learn how much the respondents use the training and help materials in the application and how effective the materials are

Basic Results

I ended up with sixteen questions, some of which were demographic. According to Qualtrics (the software I used), 497 people accessed the survey, and 420 people completed it. However, I found as I analyzed the results that some respondents skipped questions and didn’t really fill it out completely. Still, about 230 out of 340 worldwide offices were represented in the result set, and I’m happy with the relatively high response rate.

As a bit of background, we have an online help system and a training page for this app. The training page has links to role-based quick reference guides in PDF and video demos in Flash. The help is your typical old-school tripane WebHelp with index, search, and so on.

Here are some key findings (numbers taken from those who responded, not the overall 497 or 420):

• 42.7% were not aware of the quick reference guides
• 28.3% were aware of QRGs but never use them
• About 25% have used QRGs at least once
• Average effectiveness rating out of 1 to 7 is 4.11 (so just above moderate)
• About 85% print QRGs when they use them

› Continue reading…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

In our quest to get more decision-making weight in the organization, the User Education team is putting together a set of standard practices. You may wonder why we don’t already have these. To put it succinctly, we still have to carve out our place in the IT department’s project lifecycle so that at least most projects have a user education component to them. Since there have been only a few of us, we’ve operated mostly by our own judgment, each person doing what he judged appropriate for each project.

We’ve come to realize that if we want our department to take us seriously and give us the place we want, we need to be equipped to justify the decisions we make on what user education products are right for any given project. One of the things I’d like to see happen in our team is to develop a menu of products, each with a specific definition and an explanation of the situation(s) in which we would recommend that product.

I’ve taken a first shot at this. I’d like your help to flesh this list out, the descriptions, and the reasons you’d use each one. In the comments, please let me know what I’ve left out.

Quick Reference Guide: One-to-eight-page guide that contains reference information, repeatable tasks, or some combination of these. Used when users have small number of tasks or will frequently need to refer to charts, tabular data, and so on.

Quick-Start Guide: One or two sheets that explain the steps for setting something up. Could also provide a set of most common tasks. A throw-away document. Focus may lean toward one-time training.

Short Guide: Thirty-to-forty-page document that provides task steps and reference information. Used when there is too much information for a quick reference guide.

› Continue reading…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Tom Johnson has me thinking about using story in technical writing. Run a search on “story” on his blog, and you’ll find a long list of results. Because I enjoy fiction writing, I’ve tried to think about how narrative can be woven into documentation more. People connect readily with narrative because it’s part of our everyday interactions. And I think it’s more fun to write. I haven’t written about this as much as Tom, but I’ve written a bit.

I was thinking about it today and had an idea. I think I may have seen this done before, but not much. The concept is creating tutorials around the idea of the learner helping someone who’s stuck. Many people learn better, get concepts cemented in their minds, when they teach those concepts to someone else.

Well, why not work a narrative into an e-learning module that describes a problem a co-worker is having, and then turn things over to the user to guide this character through the next steps? You work in both a story and a way to have the user teach someone else (albeit a fictional character). And it may remove pressure from the learner because the focus isn’t on him or her.

This is certainly an idea that needs some development. If you’re aware of places where this concept has been used in e-learning, please let me know.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites