Usability inspection methods
Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
An interaction initiative model for documentation
Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation
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As a usability research and information design firm, Tec-Ed has noted the advantages of evaluating a product's usability in conjunction with developing its print and online documentation. Usability research identifies the problems with a user interface. When business or technical constraints prevent problems from being corrected in the interface, we still improve the product's usability by addressing these problems in the documentation. In other cases, the documentation can inform us of specific problems to research in the usability work.This paper describes two case studies in which the same team performed both usability and documentation projects for a product. In addition to the expected benefits from combining usability and documentation work, using the same team resulted in efficiencies in process and quality of execution. The experience also suggests that usability evaluation is not simply an alternative career path for technical communicators, but rather a complementary skill that can enhance their professional development while adding more value to the work they do for employers as well as users.