English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

“The revising and editing phase is where your documents will go from ‘adequate’ to ‘excellent’”

One of the main insights to make about the reading on usability is that it is important to analyze the document and how it can be tested. I do just that:

After reading through both chapter 12 and instructor bog 6 I have come up with what I think will be the best way to test my list of instructions. Just like the instructor said in the blog, it is hard to use some of these tests with an online course, but there is one test that I believe is a good one that can be used. I decided to use the survey style of test for testing my instructions. I think this is the best test to use for me for a few reasons. The first is the obvious, this is an online course and not everyone has access to the same equipment.

Usability is a very important part in today’s society. I would even venture to say it has become excessive. Sure, in most aspects the usability of objects or features is vital to the consumer, but there comes a time where people take it too far. There were quite a few examples of “bad designs” where I thought that people just took too far. For example, airpark, the airport parking codes.

Like Instructor Blog #6 says, the concept of usability is intuitive. Something that's really frustration is trying to use a product or process that is poorly designed and unnecessarily hard to use. However, the blog continues by saying it's easy as a designer or writer to lose sight of usability, which is why attention to usability on this project is important.

After reading this weeks readings I feel that the document markup would be the best form of usability testing that I could use. I think that this would be especially useful for my novice instruction set. I think this is because when people are first starting out with something new it is a lot easier to become confused when you do not understand something. I also think that the document markup would be best because something that makes perfect sense to me may not make little or no sense to a novice.

My documents are instruction sets for making creme brulee. The novice set is intended to be a step-by-step pictorial set of directions that will be as visually oriented as possible. The advanced user version will be more of a formal recipe informed with pictures, margin asides, and a brief introduction. That said, I intend to use the "read and locate" usability text with optional "summary test".

I found this week’s reading to be quite interesting. I really like how the book stated that revision process of your document is actually “re-visioning”. It made me realize how you should gain a new perspective on your document through this process. In addition to the revising process, I found the reading on usability testing to be quite practical. However, I did find some subjects to be sort of questionable.

The usability testing phase is crucial for companies to conduct before releasing a new product. In the Instructor Blog #6 it defines the concept in detail by saying, “ ...products should be usable in the real world environments where they function.” While constructing a usability test it's important to select a method to test your instruction. The method you select should be appropriately fitted for your needs in order to give you the necessary feedback in order to aid your instruction.

This week’s readings were very helpful when addressing the issue of usability for our instructions project. I think the hardest part of this project will be translating the deep knowledge we have of our topics to something that can be easily followed by novice users. The readings give good insight on how to achieve this: it’s an iterative process. No one will get it right on the first or second try, but using the tools and testing methods discussed in Chapter 12 will be essential to creating a usable document.