Evaluating the user experience of documentation -- Podcast with Bob Watson
This week I chatted with Bob Watson, an assistant professor of tech comm at Mercer University, about how to evaluate the user experience of documentation. The idea of doing a podcast came up during a comment thread on a previous post about reconstructing the absent user. We had a long exchange in the comment threads and thought it would be good to have a podcast about the topic.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Listen here:
You can download the MP3 file, subscribe in iTunes, or listen with Stitcher.
Here are a few questions we cover during the podcast:
- Should tech writers do user testing and research, or is this product team’s job in designing the product?
- Can’t we just leverage marketing personas for the user research we need?
- How can looking at the market and product angles help clarify user needs and behaviors?
- What kind of knowledge can we leverage from universal design patterns about how users consume docs?
- How do we avoid hasty generalizations from a user sample that’s too small?
- Is it feasible for tech writers to actually do user testing on top of all of their other duties?
- How can you make feedback forms on docs more likely to get responses from users?
- If you collect feedback at major milestones that users complete, how do you avoid just collecting responses from successful users?
- How does Twilio successfully collect info from their users?
- How can you successfully gather metrics that show user success or failure on tasks?
- How can you make your feedback surveys specific to the data so that you get better responses?
For more information about Bob Watson, see his site, Docs by Design.
