Documentación HOW TO

Cómo añadir usabilidad a la documentación de tu programa

Usability in Technical Documentation

Technical writers are involved at a very late stage in the product-development life cycle due to which the quality of the documentation suffers.

1. Time bound deliverables

Due to late involvement; technical writers are bounded to create documents with a quick turn around time.

2. Closely associated with the development team hence they are

a. Dictated by the product development team

b. Biased and tend to use technical jargons

c. More focused on the functions and features rather than the user’s tasks

3. No access to the actual users

Technical writers usually don’t have an in-dept knowledge about the target audience for whom they are catering to hence the documentation-

a. Does not speak the user’s language

b. Reflects a lot of cultural issues

Technical writers can overcome these challenges by

* Getting the organization to have “Technical Writing” as a planned activity
* Involving them in the early stage of the product life cycle
* By creating “User Focused Usable” documents, which is the most critical activity Testing documents of a product with “actual” users is key to create “Usable” documents.