Activities and Discussion
- For discussion: Why must you, as a sexy technical writer, need to consider usability evaluation and/or testing through all stages of generating documents or websites?
- For discussion: How does the concept of “usability” support the principle characteristics of effective technical communication?
- Activity or discussion: Take a look at your school’s website. Imagine you are going to conduct a usability test on it. What tasks would you generate? What participants would you involve? For example: Find out how a community group not affiliated with the university can book a space to host an event.
- Activity or discussion: Locate a set of instructions for something you own and evaluate the instructions on the basis of the five characteristics of usability. Are you able to suggest improvements to the design?
- Activity or discussion: In small groups, choose some of your favorite websites, examine them, and create a user profile. Your profile will include gender and sex, age, education level, economic status, profession, or whatever else you determin. Then…turn it around. Create a different user profile and identify what changes you would make to improve the site for this new user.
- Activity or discussion: The FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) website has resources for people who need assistance. Consider the usability of the site for an individual with limited computer experience…what would you do to improve the chances of this individual in a flood or hurricane?
- Activity: In the instructions chapter, you created an instruction manual. Recruiting friends or classmates, design a usability test for your manual, conduct it, and then write up the report following the format of a scientific or lab report.
