Revising documentation deliverables based on usability evaluation findings

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Revising documentation deliverables based on usability evaluation findings: a case study

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ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication archive
Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Design of communication: The engineering of quality documentation table of contents

Memphis, Tennessee, USA

SESSION: Documentation quality table of contents

Pages: 17 - 18

Year of Publication: 2004

ISBN:1-58113-809-1

Author

Dave Yeats

Texas Tech University

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGDOC : ACM Special Interest Group on Systems Documentation

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 4, Downloads (12 Months): 76, Citation Count: 1

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ABSTRACT

As various usability-testing methods continue to gain in popularity in software development organizations, it is time to examine how software documentation can also benefit from usability evaluation. This short paper briefly describes a case study in which a software documentation team used the findings from a usability study of their software installation manual to justify a large change in the architecture of their information deliverables. Specifically, the team chose to cease delivery of their installation documentation in a printed manual format in favor of context-sensitive online help delivered directly in the installation wizard interface. The online help version of the installation instructions meets the users' usability requirements by allowing users to access information directly from the interface itself.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Carol M. Barnum , Sam Dragga, Usability Testing and Research, Allyn & Bacon, Inc., Needham Heights, MA, 2001
	2	Joseph S. Dumas , Janice C. Redish, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, Intellect Books, Exeter, UK, 1999
	3	Postava-Davignon, C., C. Kamachi, C. Clarke, G. Kushmerek, M. B. Rettger, P. Monchamp, and R. Ellis. "Incorporating Usability Testing into the Documentation Process." Technical Communication 51.1, 2004. 36--44.