Chapter 14: Designing and Testing Documents for Usability

Usability testing greatly helps your readers, and this point will be explored, in depth, in this chapter summary. I will also help you understand why usable designs are essential, and also how to achieve a usable design.

The end goal of your document will always be for your readers to actually be able to use your document effectively. To this end, companies routinely conduct usability testing to see how people will use the document. Information is collected in testing that will help you revise and edit your document to make it most effective. Usable documents are safe, dependable, and easy to read, and no matter what the format, your document will help your reader to three things (Lannon, pg. 325):

• easily locate the information they need
• understand the information immediately
• use the information safely and successfully

Usable design is so important that in order to keep customers and stay out of legal trouble, companies go to extreme lengths to make sure that their documents cover all probable ways it can be misunderstood or misused.

Meeting specific criteria is critical in your usable document, and these criteria can be found by asking several questions about your document (Lannon, pg. 326):

• What tasks will people need to perform to achieve their goals?
• What do we know about the specific audience's abilities and limitations?
• In what setting will the document be read/used?

When you have determined how exactly your readers will use your information, you can formulate a purpose statements which guides all of your planning and writing of your document. Considering the conditions used which your document will be used is also important. You should also research your typical audience, including what age they are, how educated they are, etc. If you spell out exactly what kind of performance you want your reader to accomplish after utilizing your document, it will be easier to lay out your document. Identifying possible risks in your document is also a great way to compensate for those risks.

A document plan is the best way to prepare for achieving usability. Any writing, testing or revision should be done after thorough planning, too. 

As always, it's important to make sure that the message you are sending in your document is ethically sound. You should also remember to respect cultural differences, which has been outlined numerous times in previous blog posts.

Digital documents sometimes have different considerations when it comes to usability. Online documents oftentimes focus on doing things rather than explaining them, this means that outlines are common in digital form. Online instructions are not persuasive because they usually guide you from step to step. Visuals are the most important part of online instructions, and online documents are meant to be interactive, not in linear sequences. Digital documents are oftentimes organized differently than their print counterparts, as well, which makes sense because the formatting requirements are completely different.

Group Discussion Question: Say you've created a document for your peers in your major at Clemson, how would you go about testing usability? What sorts of methods would you use?