Re: "Know thy audience"; was: RE: What is "well Written"?

[Yves JEAUROND <jingting -at- rogers -dot- com>]

John makes a logical case;
 it is difficult though getting users to go through the trouble of
filling out a card or what not, to communicate their success
 rate for each procedure in every manual they use.
  Do such users in fact exist?
   
  I don't mean to rain on the parade of quantification,
  and data acquisition; the big, grey cloud of impractical idealism
hovers over getting objective, measurable criticism when it comes
 to an art like TW. 
   
  And a "typical" user? Who are they? Where do they live?
 What's their background? Are they repeat customers?
Is five of them in a classroom environment a representative sample
for six sigma work? It gets subjective, complicated and qualitative
 mighty quickly :-)
   
  There's also trigger-happy management to consider:
  you get kudos from customers and little happens. Then one complaint
comes in--fair or unfair--and what happens next :-( ? 
   
  My three cents,
  YJ 
   
  
John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com> a écrit :
  Sorry for the delay in responding...deadlines, ya'know?

anyway...

> It is our function, among other things, to create 
> documentation that makes the discovery of what to 
> seek a straightforward task with a minimum
> of frustrations. (Also why a good index is a godsend, 
> to respond to yet another current thread!)

Documentation makes no discoveries...you need to make your
discoveries and, in my opinion, can only do it WITH documentation by
testing how it is used, examining the results of the tests and making
continual improvements to the documentation based on the tests.

Get five typical users. Present to them a section of a document and
observe if/how they were able to accomplish the goal of the section,
what conent they used, what they didn't. Maybe an index is good...you
don't know until you observe and se that they looked for an
index...if not one of your test subjects looked for one, how useful
would it be?

If they were not able to perform the task, or if they were but with
dificulty/questions/needed hints, address where they were having the
problem, then test five other typical users. Continue this cycle
untill you've reached a satisfactory result, run out of users, run
out of time, or run out of money. At least now you have a better idea
of the appropriate type of documentation, it's depth, how detailed,
how technical, what kind of language, etc. Now make style guide and
templates reflect this investigation, as long as the targeted user is
the same.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"They say everyone needs goals. Mine is to live forever.
So far, so good."
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