Chapter 2: Technical Writing Process
2.1 User Interaction and Usability Testing
This section explains how identifying, doing research about, and speaking to your primary audience, or end-users, allows you to create content that is useable and useful. Asking users questions, understanding their needs and job duties, conducting usability tests at all steps of the writing process leads to a well-designed, useful document.
Learning Objectives
After reading this section, you will be able to
- define user interaction, user-experience design, usability, and usability testing
- conduct a basic usability test
What is User Interaction and User-Experience Design?
As technical writers, you write and design documents for specific audiences and purposes, which means that you need to understand your audience at a deep level. In fact, you cannot, and should not, write until you understand their needs, values, goals, and even job duties. In order to fully understand specific users, you need to do research on your users, which can be time intensive, by conducting an audience analysis through data analytics, talking to your cross-functional team members, and conducting social media surveys (as discussed in chapter 1). User interaction means you talk to your intended users directly to find out what they need and how they would use your document. Gather as much information as possible by taking detailed notes to help you achieve your goal of producing usable and useful documents.
User-experience design, also known as UX, means that you create “products that work well for … users” (Redish, 2012, p. xxvi). The term user-experience design was coined by Donald Norman in 1995 (Kleinschnitz, 2023) who focused on the user interaction with objects which need to be intuitively designed. This means that objects need to be clearly and carefully so that the user can interpret how to use the object simply by visual clues (Norman, 2013).
The field of UX has crossed with technical communication since technical documents are user focused which need to be intuitive, designed for easy use, and useful.
In Industry
In the technical writing process, talking to and asking questions of actual software users is necessary because you need to know what they need, value, and want (Jackson, 2004). Additionally, gathering information about their job duties and workflows will help you write and design appropriate documents. Your interpersonal skills are important in this step since you need to “listen and ask questions” effectively and “be diligent in seeking and obtaining sufficient knowledge [about your] audience” (Blakeslee & Savage, 2013, 377).
One way to gather user information for websites is to use Google Analytics. Google Analytics has free and paid versions, and you can create a Google Analytics account by giving Google information about your website name, URL, and industry. You can then add a tracking code into the <head> section of your website’s html which will then track your users. Google Analytics gathers pseudonymous data which they then convert into reports for you (Google, 2024).
You should also talk to your company’s sales, executive, engineering, and support teams (known as cross-functional teams) to gather information about your intended users as well as read previous user reports from other technical writers.
In School
If time allows, you could conduct a user analysis similar to what you would do in industry; however, time generally does not allow for such in depth study. Instead, you will choose your own audience, as stated in Chapter 1 of this tutorial. You will design your persona along with writing their needs, values, goals, and job duties to be as realistic as possible, which will ultimately help you write and design your document starting with the prewriting stage.
What is Usability and Usability testing in technical communication?
According to Barnum (2002):
a product’s usability is determined by the user’s perception of the quality of the product, based on the user’s ease of use, ease of learning and relearning, the product’s intuitiveness for the user, and the user’s appreciation of the usefulness of a product
where “usefulness is defined in terms of the user’s need for the product in the context of the user’s goals” (italics original, p. 6).
A significant part of the technical writing process is usability testing. Usability testing is different from peer review in that in a usability test, you give your document to the intended user to see how they interact with it.
The purpose of usability testing is to evaluate whether or not the user can adequately perform the tasks and then you get constructive feedback from users to help you revise the document. Ultimately, they help you determine whether the content and design are usable and intuitive, and much like this current writing process, usability testing can, and should, occur at different points in the writing process, which makes it recursive as well.
Usability testing is specific to technical communication since most writers of other genres won’t need feedback from real users. Incorporating usability testing into your writing process enables you to create intuitive and efficient user-centered documents although adding usability testing to your writing process increases the time it takes to write and design.
To conduct a basic usability test
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- Find actual users for your documents. Make sure that your sample is random and diverse from a large user pool for more unbiased results. Some researchers pay their participants for their time (Alexander, 2013).
- Set up interviews, observations of performance with the document, and focus groups with those users
- Provide task sheets to help them understand what they should do or look for during the test (Alexander, 2013).
- Allow them to interact with the tutorial, task sheet, and the software as they follow the instructions. For other types of documents, you should also give the users a list of questions based on the content in the document and ask them to find the answers while you observe their endeavors (Tebeaux & Dragga, 2018)
- Get their feedback on the content, organization, navigation, and design of the document
- Implement changes based on their feedback and your observations of their interactions with the document
- Repeat as necessary
