|
September 2002 |
Newsletter from the India Chapter of STC |
Volume IV, Number 4 |
PDF Version (435 KB)
Situations Vacant |
|
Networking
|
|
Learning
|
|
Tidbits
|
Why Technical Communicators Make Good Usability Advocates
By Carol Barnum
Usability is rapidly becoming an important skill for technical communicators and a growing interest for those seeking to expand their role as technical communicators into other areas of product development. The STC usability SIG now has over 2000 members, and the conference sessions at STC regional and annual conferences increasingly focus on usability. This year, a new “stem” was created at the annual conference, which combined Information Design and Usability, because they just naturally belong together. It worked so well that it will be continued in future conferences.
|
Having recently returned from first the STC annual conference and then the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) annual conference, I was pleased to see that there are an increasing number of advanced sessions for those of us who have been in the business for a number of years, as well as a number of sessions for those interested in learning about it or just getting started. At this year’s UPA conference, one session was entitled “How to market yourself as a usability professional." |
The invited speaker, a marketing consultant, asked each of the participants to write down a 7-word description of what we do. Try it yourself to see if you can introduce yourself to someone who doesn’t know what a technical communicator does. It can be quite a challenge. Then add to that challenge the need to explain what a specialist in usability does. The challenge becomes even greater.
As a technical communicator and usability specialist (not to mention my job as a college professor!), how would I define what I do in 7 words, or even 14 words? Perhaps I might say that as a usability specialist I work with developers to represent the needs of users and build the user’s experience into successful products. A few more than 14 words. But, would you really know what I do?
If you indicated your interest by asking me a follow-up question, I might explain that I typically work with software that’s hard to use, perhaps because it has too many features and is arranged in a way that doesn’t make sense to the user or perhaps because the terminology used doesn’t match the user’s own vocabulary. Or perhaps the arrangement of the information doesn’t match the user’s way of doing work. If you asked me a few more questions to show you were really interested, I might launch into a discussion of the Web and the dot-com failure, which can be traced in part to the race to get Web sites up without thinking about whether they worked for the intended users. As so many failed dotcoms came to understand, one bad experience and the user was gone in a click, never to return.
It has been a hard lesson to learn, but an important one in moving usability—the experience of satisfaction a user should have—to the centre stage. However, with every problem comes an opportunity, and the problems of “products” that aren’t usable provides an opportunity for technical communicators.
Why? Because we are
the natural protectors of the user. We generally see ourselves as the
“user advocate” and in this role it makes sense that we are the ones
to make the appeal for usability testing as part of product development,
whether the product is documentation, training, software, hardware,
e-learning, web applications or web portals.
We are also charged with responsibility for the content, whether
the content is in the form of documentation or information and whether
the medium is paper or online or the Web.
As content developers, our case for being involved in the usability of products is made even stronger by a study conducted by User Interface Engineering (UIE), a usability consulting firm in the United States, in which it was reported that of the 24 web sites evaluated for usability, content-related issues caused 40.2% of the usability obstacles. What do they mean by a content-related issue? As they define it, “If you were to completely revamp the functionality and information architecture of the site, the [usability] problem would still persist” (UIETips, 7/23/02).
If that information isn’t sufficiently convincing to get you thinking about your potential role as a usability expert, here’s another startling statistic. This one comes from usability expert Jakob Nielsen in a July 2002 Alertbox, his online newsletter:" To reach the goal of making technology truly suited for humans, the world will need about half a million new usability professionals over the next 20 years. The sooner the training begins, the better off we’ll all be.” (www.useit.com/alertbox)
Much has been made in
past issues of Indus and at 3rd STC India annual conference in Bangalore, about the
need for technical communication
education in India. I was invited to
address this topic at the conference, and at that time I could not
locate one academic programme in technical communication in India,
although a small number of companies are offering education and training
in technical communication. While technical communication education is
critical to your continued lifelong learning (as it is for all of us in
such a rapidly evolving field), you should not discount the importance
of getting onto the train just leaving the station (if I may use a
metaphor to make the point) in including usability testing in your ever
expanding learning to increase your skills and talents as a technical
communicators.
But, where to start if you want to begin learning about the topic now? STC, of course. Not only has your STC India chapter played an important role in presenting workshops and seminars on the topic of usability and the user-centred design process, but the STC Usability SIG is an invaluable resource and one of the best-managed SIGs in STC (in my opinion, at least). Go to www.stcsig.org/usability.There you will find resources, articles, templates, guidelines, and much more.
You will also find a list of books, among which (if I may be permitted a special mention) is my new book from Longman (2002), called Usability Testing and Research. It will give you a step-by-step process to follow in learning about usability and usability testing. And the main example in the book is Hotmail, which is well-known around the world, although there are other examples of usability tests of software, documentation, tutorials, and more. Or you can get started even faster by going to the book’s website at www.ablongman.com/barnum.
Although it may be difficult to define “technical communicator” and even more difficult to define “usability,” it is not difficult to see an opportunity for technical communicators to become usability advocates in your organisations. After all, who else can better speak on behalf of the user?
(Carol
Barnum is professor of technical communication at Southern Polytechnic
State University in Marietta (Atlanta), GA, USA, where she teaches a
graduate course in usability testing. Her most recent book Usability
Testing and Research, can be ordered in India through the publisher,
Orient Longman. Carol can be reached by email at cbarnum@spsu.edu.)
STC India | Home | Contact Us
Copyright © 2002 India Chapter STC. All rights reserved.