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. With a foundation of questions and a quantitative list of types of tests, the author can decide what examination is most useful for their document.
When answering the four questions for our instruction application, the most important one to answer is “Can they do it?” Performance is our main priority as we are to instruct individuals through a process. And it is in our best interest that the readers accomplish it efficiently and successfully. Next, because of the nature of complicated hardware and software that some of us are using the following question to answer is “Can they find it?” As a result, we should incorporate several images and related graphics. And for our purpose, “can they understand it?” is the question that separates the novice and experienced users. We should pay attention to this question when differentiating the needs between the two users.
For my usability test, I decided to perform the informal document markup. The definition of document markup is to ask sample users to attempt the tasks written in the document as they are reading while recording areas where they misunderstand. I find this test the most appealing to my set of instructions the best. Because my directions are performance based, it is important to visualize how effective my instructions are. In addition, real time feedback and experienced based questions are most valuable to my format.
Tires
I think that a document markup will work pretty well for your tire maintenance project. I am using a document markup with my project also and because they are both hands-on projects I think our approach will go very well. With the document markup, the instructions for our projects can be analyzed and get a real point of view on what needs to be changed. I like your idea on doing a instruction manual on bike maintenance. It seems like everyone should know how to put a tire on a bike wheel but it is actually a time consuming project if you do not know what to do.
Usability test for bicycles instructions
I feel that the usability markup will work well in your situation. I find that it is important to actually go through the steps and mark the parts of where it becomes unclear to a user. This I think will focus more to the novice audience; as the instructions guide the user through the processes. Also with an experienced user who has performed maintenance on a bicycle will be able to give you feed back of any ambiguities in your instructions.
Overall it is important for users to know of bicycle maintenance, especially on a college campus, where there are an abundance of bicycle owners. Students will have instructions to do necessary maintenance to their rides.
Zebulon Rouse
Terminology
I think document markup will be beneficial to your instructions. For a process like changing a bike tire, each step is important to end up with the proper final result, a useable tire/tube. Steps in this process can’t be avoided, so if a usability tester gets stuck and gives proper feedback it should make the instructions more effective. Something else you might get from this usability testing is seeing if the user knows certain terminology being used. If you are using terms like skewers, or cassette , a beginner user probably won’t know what you are referring to and it will be apparent with document markup.