How to test technical documentation usability
Usability in itself is the primary purpose of technical documentation. No matter how igneous your software product is, if your documentation is ineffective, it will negatively affect your user's experience with the product.
The ease with which users can achieve a purpose or goal using this documentation is what equals the usefulness of your technical documentation. It is important to note that the accuracy of your documentation doesn't equal the helpfulness of the documentation.
This is why you should ascertain the usability of your software documentation and how well it guides users through the product.
In this article, we will take a deep dive into documentation usability, why we should test documentation usability, what to test for in your technical documents, and the techniques for testing documentation usability.
What is documentation usability?
Technical documentation usability refers to how easily and effectively a user can achieve a goal using product documentation. Primarily, it is how much success users achieve on a product or software by following the docs.
Companies wait until the documentation is published to find out if it improves the customer experience or solves the said problem. However, it is more practical to test the usability of the documentation before publishing.
This way, there is more room for improvements and modifications in line with the purpose of the documentation.
Documentation usability should focus on user goals such as understanding how to solve a problem, carry out an action, or clarify a concept.
Why test documentation usability?
Before presenting documentation to a much broader audience or the intended users, it is important to certify that it is helpful enough.
This is where documentation usability testing comes into play. As with your product, where you perform software testing to evaluate and verify that it functions as it should, testing your documentation usability is also essential.
Useful documentation is accurate, clear, concise, and easy to follow when solving a problem or achieving a purpose. With this, users can easily find whatever they are searching for, understand it clearly, and achieve their goals using it.
Releasing a product or documentation without prior and proper testing can lead to several problems for the brand. Some of these include
When your product documentation can help customers solve problems independently, it deepens their confidence in your brand. This is because most customers prefer self-service, which saves them time and boosts their esteem.
Appropriate documentation usability testing can result in increased brand loyalty, reduced number of tickets for customer support, and consequently, lower cost of running the customer support team. In general, it helps create a better customer experience.
What to test for in technical documentation?
It is one thing to know that documentation usability testing is important, but another to know what to test for to produce solid documentation.
The fundamental principle to bear in mind when testing for documentation usability is that the goal is for the documentation to solve problems easily and without creating chaos in the user's mind.
Now that you understand that, here are some important specifics to pay attention to when testing your technical documentation
Checklist for documentation testing
When it comes to readability, you need to consider the flow, clarity, and ease that comes with the text. Remember that before you even write, you have to define your audience. If the product is for developers, then your documentation can accommodate some technical information.
However, if you are writing for non-technical users, simplify the documentation as much as possible. Technical writing aims to simplify technical jargon so that end-users find it clear, concise, and easy to understand.
There are several things to consider when it comes to readability. First, following a style guide for your documentation is necessary to achieve consistency across all technical documentation that you put out.
Microsoft and Google style guides suggest using active voice in your technical documentation. Using active voice against passive voice helps you achieve more clarity and better flow to your texts.
You should also watch out for long sentences and paragraphs. Readers tend only to read shorter paragraphs as they come across as boring or time-consuming. Work your way around forming shorter sentences and paragraphs that contain three to five sentences at most.
Another aspect of readability to improve is grammar and vocabulary. When writing technical documentation, consider users who have limited vocabulary. Some users can be non-native English speakers.
To help improve the readability of your technical documentation, you can use writing tools such as Grammarly, and Heminwayapp.com.
In addition to readability, you should also check how well users can navigate your documentation. Structure plays an important role in if users will find your documentation useful.
In most cases, when users check through documentation, they only intend to read some of the content. They require a particular solution to a problem or information to help them understand an aspect of the product.
This is why you should ensure that when checking for documentation usability, you check for proper content structure. Are users able to navigate the documentation with ease? Does it contain a table of content? Is the text searchable? Is the content divided into sections?
With all of these in place, the reader can easily skim through the technical documentation and find the answers or information they seek.
Another aspect to check for is how accurate and complete the docs are, which is a part of determining documentation usability. Start by ensuring that you explain every important function related to that product's use.
Describe actions properly to help users avoid being stuck along the way. If a prerequisite should be in place before users can download the software, then you should mention it. Skipping that information in your documentation will frustrate the user when it is time to implement.
For instance, before installing Appwrite on your computer, you must first install Docker for either Linux, Windows, or Mac. If the Appwrite documentation doesn't include this important information, users will get stuck, leading to low software usage.
While this might seem like it doesn't matter much, publishing documentation that contains a guide or tutorial in the wrong sequence is as good as producing ineffective docs. To confirm documentation usability, you should check for a sequence of steps.
If you have documentation containing a guide on carrying out a particular action, ensure that the steps or the list of processes are in the correct order. This way, users will find it easy to follow and achieve the goal. They know what step to take first and what step comes next.
Putting out documentation containing outdated content is of no use to your readers. Every feature, function, or element you mention in the documentation should be functional in the current version of the product.
The documentation you publish for users should contain relevant information which is also up to date. The content should be in line with the most recent version of the software or product. This is why documentation is written only once and for all; it needs to be updated continuously.
Techniques for testing documentation usability
Now that you know what to check for when it comes to documentation usability, here is how to go about testing your documentation.
There are three methods you can use when testing documentation usability. Each of these methods serves specific purposes.
Paraphrase testing
As the name implies, paraphrase testing focuses on how well the user understands your text or information. This means they can repeat what you have written in the documentation in their own words. If the readers involved in the testing cannot do them, the technical writers must rework the documentation.
Paraphrasing test helps expose the inappropriate use of vocabulary and the need for clarity in your documentation. In this testing method, users don't read the complete documentation at once. Participants only read and paraphrase a fragment of the content at a time.
Plus-Minus testing
As opposed to Paragraph testing, which considers the documentation in parts, or segments, Plus-Minus testing examines it as a whole. In this case, participants react to the full documentation, not an isolated portion.
Menno de Jong and Peter Jan Schellens, Dutch authors, came up with the Plus-Minus test. They explain that in this method, 'Participants read the documentation as a whole and express their reactions and reading experience. On the margin, they indicate if they had a positive experience by adding plus and then minus for negative experience.'
This method helps you gather participants' reactions to your documentation, and it helps you define what parts or clear or vague. It also makes it easy to know parts of the documentation that require adjustments or improvements.
Task-Based testing
As mentioned earlier, readers mostly use documentation to solve problems or get information. In Task-Based testing, the focus is to see how well contributors can find specific information using the documentation.
This method is used mostly for instructional documents or documents that describe a functionality. These include user guides, installation manuals, troubleshooting guides, integration guides, etc.
Here, the user only reads what is important or needed. You can observe how easily they can find the required information and how well they can follow the instructions. The Task-Based test helps you locate irrelevant parts of the documentation you can take out for greater clarity.
Conclusion
As technical writers, over time, we become conversant with the documentation we write or the product we describe to the point that we cannot determine how useful the documentation is. This is because we clearly understand it and how it should function. However, the documentation is not written for the writer but for the product's end-user, and this should be the focus.
Including usability testing in the product development process helps establish the documentation's usefulness and effectiveness. Most importantly, it improves user experience and increases the product's success.