This article was originally published in theApril 2010 issue (Vol 15, No. 1)

About the Author

Arun Martin is a member of the India Chapter. Arun is working as a Technical Writer for VMware, Bangalore. Arun is a first-time author of an article for Usability Interface.

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Usability for Technical Writers

By Arun Martin, India Chapter

The User Research and Usability SIG of the STC India Chapter conducted a session on Usability for Technical Writers at Huawei Technologies India Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore, on March 20, 2010.

About the Session

The session was presented by Suman Kumar (Usability Analyst with CDC Software, Bangalore) to an enthusiastic audience of nearly 50 attendees. Ms. Michelle Cherian, STC India Chapter President, spoke briefly about STC and its activities. Mr. Swaminathan Moorthy, STC India Chapter Secretary, stated the advantages of being an STC member.

Suman Kumar discussed the concept of user experience (UX), followed by a workshop on usability.

The presentation focused on the following topics:

• Why should a technical writer know about UX?
• How can UX help technical writers and organizations?
• Requirements to be an UX professional.
• What are the responsibilities of UX professionals?
• Volunteering to perform UX-based tasks.
• Building a personal brand.
• How to prepare for a UX job?

What I Learned

Because technical writers create documentation from an end-user perspective, an understanding of UX concepts provides an insight into how users perform their tasks. This goes a long way in making the documents user-friendly to them.

It is essential for technical writers to understand the importance of good design. Being user advocates, sometimes the only advocate on the team, it is especially important to have a good grounding in UX principles, so that the product design achieves the balance between efficiency and desirability.

Within an organization, UX helps to build solutions that satisfy the user needs by being user-friendly. A good UX approach will allow organizations to get a lead over their competition, for example, there were MP3 players before the Apple iPod. However, the user-friendly iPod outsold every other MP3 player on the market when it was launched.

UX helps organizations to stay ahead of the competition. Technical writers can produce clear documentation deliverables that provide value to users.

To be a UX professional requires a deep interest in the UX processes, patience, and good listening skills are a pre-requisite. In addition, a UX professional has an open mind, willingness to learn, and ability to look at things differently. Various institutes, universities and colleges offer courses/degrees in usability.

A UX professional typically conducts user-research (as opposed to market research), wire framing/prototyping, usability testing, and expert reviews.

The best way to get involved in UX-based tasks is to volunteer to review GUI literals, error messages, menus, dialog boxes, and textual content.

To build a personal brand you need to create a niche presence in the usability area (e.g., research and design) through blogs. Follow the leaders in the UX industry and read their commentary. Join UX groups on LinkedIn and Twitter. Evangelize the importance of usability to all the stakeholders in the company by showing them examples of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) or web pages with and without usability principles.

If you want to prepare for career in UX, volunteer to test user interfaces. Never criticize bad designs; instead, provide solutions to improve them. Understand that interpretation is the better part of user testing. Build credibility and promote awareness of usability with other teams. If your company has an UX team, volunteer for small activities, and learn more about the work of the team.

An Introduction to Usability and Desirability

Suman conducted two workshops that taught the class how usability contributes to desirability.

• The first workshop was an exercise to discover the usability and desirability of four leading mobile phone brands in India.
  The class was asked to make a phone call and send an SMS. Each person was given a different handset, and each person had an observer to watch the sequence of tasks and the time to complete them. At the end of the workshop, the observers shared their findings on the easiest user interface.
  Leading mobile brands such as Nokia, Samsung, Sony Erickson, and Motorola were evaluated. After the workshop, we thought that Nokia provided an easier user interface to perform our given tasks.
  We learned that the balance between form and function is important for production experience. Previously, Samsung mobiles did not have a easy-to-use user interface. This could have impacted their initial sales. Over the years, Samsung mobiles have improved their user interfaces and this has contributed to their increased market share.
• For the second workshop, the class was asked to review the Indian Railways Website (www.irctc.co.in) to observe the balance between desirability and usability.
  The class was asked to book a ticket to a specific destination on a non-existent date. For this exercise we used the current Indian Railways Website.
  The observers noted the workflow, and few others performed the task on the beta version of the Railway’s Website. Although the user experience left much to be desired on the current Website, we were able to accomplish the tasks. The user experience was a bit improved on the beta version.
  We learned that to achieve a balance between desirability and usability, users should be able to perform their tasks with a well-designed navigation.

Summary

This was a great learning event to bring the community together, and more are planned in the coming year. I learned about different usability concepts, and testing of user tasks.

The volunteers for STC India Chapter 2010 – User Research and Usability SIG are Rajdeep Gupta (STC India Chapter Vice President), Suman Kumar, Xavier Roy, and Arun Martin.