Usability Testing

Before reading the two articles, I did not have much background knowledge about usability testing.  The most interesting piece of information I learned was that a technical writer has many of the skills required to be a usability specialist. In his article, “Career Development: Filling the Usability Gap,” Ted Brooks explains that “a usability specialist designs, or influences the design of, user interfaces. The user interface consists of all of the ways that a user interacts with a product” (Brooks 181). I found this description of a usability specialist quite interesting because the job of a usability specialist definitely overlaps with the job of a technical writer. Both usability specialists and technical writers design and test user content in a way that communicates information to nontechnical audiences. Brooks points out in his article the similarity of usability testing and technical writing by saying that “technical communicators have always been conscious of users’ needs; users are their audience” (Brooks 182). This is a significant observation because it shows that the field of technical communication is not just a field about technical writing. Technical communication is a broad area of study that allows new technical writing students to adapt their skills to a variety of career options, including usability testing.

In addition, the one idea that interests me most about usability testing is that it gives the technical writer a new way of experimenting with the product. It allows technical writers to become more customer-oriented in their approach for designing and writing documents and user interfaces. In their article, “Incorporating Usability Testing into the Documentation Process,” Christi-Anne Postava-Davignon et al. explain that the writers on the Documentation Usability Team had reconsidered “their previously held assumptions about what users read and in what order, what attracts attention and what does not, and what kind of information users want” (Postava-Davignon et al. 36). This is a critical idea because it is the job of technical writers to be user-oriented, and sometimes, technical writers do not always communicate effectively to readers because they do not always see their point of view. Postava-Davignon et al. make it clear that “the best way to learn about the usability of documentation is to watch people consult the documentation in the process of performing realistic tasks that are as close as possible to what users actually do” (Postava-Davignon et al. 39). The key words are “realistic tasks” because usability testing allows a team to recreate a user interface step by step, so the technical writer can incorporate it into a document. It allows technical writers to become more aware of what and how they write because it gives them an additional technique to resolve issues by experimenting with a product to create a user interface, especially since it adds credibility to a technical writer’s work. According to Brooks, usability testing is very significant because the people who buy the product “want something beyond your assurance that yes, the product is indeed usable” (Brooks 183).

           

I think Postava-Davignon et al. sum up the importance of usability testing in the technical communication field when they say that “the use of real-world tasks ensures that observations made during testing reflect issues with many aspects of our products” (Postava-Davignon et al. 42). It gives technical writers a new way to interact with products in a way that will help them reach their goals of planning, testing, and designing documents that fit the needs of the readers.