English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

In this week’s Reading Response, the students are asked to read articles that focus on usability testing. Usability testing is experimenting your document in its functional nature with valid readers. There are several effective usability testing techniques that allow the writer to understand if their technical document is efficient enough for real world applications. Usability testing is broken down into two categories: Informal and formal testing. Each test is organized by experimentation on the sample of users.

As I am creating the content of my instructions this week, it is timely that we are also talking about usability testing. Although common sense would tell us that we need to do some type of usablility testing, the TCT article and this week's Instructor Blog helped me understand what format I will use to evaluate my instructions' usability.

The process that I am choosing for this project will be to correctly use Call of Duty 5 on XBOX 360 in both a single player game mode and an online XBOX live game. I will show my audiences how to turn on the XBOX and all of the necessary steps to successfully start Call of Duty 5. There are many different steps that need to be followed to correctly set up a game, including connecting and turning on your XBOX, inserting the game, and navigating throughout all the menus for the two different users.

After reading the instructor blog and chapter 12 in the book, I have pretty much narrowed down my choices for the usability test to either use a read and locate test or a summary test. A document markup might not work well for me because not that many people in this class have an XBOX 360, let alone Call of Duty 5 for it. I also don’t think that a survey would be the best test for me to choose, just because that does not really answer any specific questions for me.

This week’s readings outlined a lot of very good methods and examples of usability test that can be targeted to our instructions. As noted in the instructor blog, many of the more formal methods of testing will be out of the question for this assignment. For my instructions I plan on using document markup, survey, and summary test. I would use a read and locate test but I plan on having a rather short manual that would make this nearly trivial. I seem to be decent at recognizing when something is not designed right or does not flow, but I can’t always find a good way to fix.

Over this week’s readings, I found the information from the TCT and instructor’s blog to have useful tools for optimizing the usability for instructions.
For the usability test, I think I am going use survey testing. For this assignment I feel that it will be a more effective way to process information. I don’t know if there are many people who have rice cookers, so instead of people buying one, I want to have feed back to see if the user would have any trouble before starting the process and wasting time and money.

I’m sure at some point we have all used products that we thought had poor usability. Did they really? Or were we blind to see the true operation of a certain product? I know there are a lot of products out there that are blatant poor designs but others are just being used improperly. Looking at the website with all of the “problem products” was pretty entertaining. Yes, there are some bad designs on there, but who says there isn’t some user error? Does everything we use in our daily life need to have huge red letters instructing people on the proper operation of a tool/product/device?

The types of usability tests that I will employ upon turning in my instructions project will include document markup, and a read and locate test. These tests will be performed during a peer review. The three main questions I want to focus on answering are ‘Can they find it?’, ‘Can they understand it?’, and ‘Can they do it?’. These will help me determine whether my instructions are getting the point that I want them to make across to the readers.

As stated in chapter 12 the context in which your document will be used may play a big roll in what kind of document you actually create. I took this into consideration because I am doing instructions on how to take apart two different guns. I figured that if someone were to be disassembling a firearm they would most likely have grease and oil on there hands. That’s why I decided to make a document that can be printed and laminated to protect it from the dirty hands and surfaces that may come into contact with it.

Editing a paper I wrote is one of my least favorite things to do after I have just written it. Part of me just does not like reading what I wrote even though I know I did a good job at it. I guess it could be compared to actors who do not like to watch the movies they are in. Something about seeing yourself on screen as someone else just does not sit right with them.