Absolutely. Without Doubt.

One major interaction that a user has with a system is the documentation accompanying the product, either as printed manuals or their electronic cousins. In fact, any text that a user sees on the screen in the form of labels and copy is a form of technical communication – another source of interaction with the user.

I’ve had many people ask me about transitioning from technical communication to usability/user experience. All I can say to them is that you might already be doing it; only that you aren’t aware of it yet.

Another question I get to field often is how to ‘get into’ it. The answer that I give mostly is Volunteer. Volunteer to check screens/copy text for clarity/disambiguity. Volunteer to check every interaction a user would have with the system. Provide clear and meaningful copy for error messages.

Technical Communicators often forget a very important fact – they are often the first users of a system. Most of the time, they are just concerned about just documenting the system, rather than looking at it from a user perspective. I’ve seen this happen a lot of times and have been guilty of the same on several occasions.

In a blog post at Adaptive Path, Peter Merholz writes, I believe that user experience is not best thought of as an activity or function, but as a mindset. To varying degrees, every customer-facing person in an organization has an impact on, and, thus, responsibility for the user experience.

That’s something everyone aspiring to be a usability practitioner ought to be taking to heart.

Out of the window, via Flickr user: Squirmelia

We deliver all of our documentation as PDFs to our customers (except for that rare marketing collaterals that get printed and distributed). These PDFs are uploaded to a repository and made available to customers (external and internal). Having observed how people use our documentation these past few years, I noticed that only a few people actually ‘glance’ at the Table of Contents. Everyone seems to like the Search button in Acrobat Reader. Just fire a few keywords and Presto!, here are the results.

All that time and effort I spent in developing that ToC and Index was down the proverbial drain as they never saw the user’s eyes. Not that you can blame them for not looking at my lovingly crafted ToC. Information seeking has moved away from getting to know the structure of a guide from the ToC or narrowing down a selective topic from the Index is no longer the right way to do things. It has evolved to the search box. PDFs are great for searching and you can even search multiple PDFs simultaneously.

In a world when documentation was printed and delivered to customers as printed books, the Table of Contents and the Index made sense as you can ‘run’ a search on a printed book. But do they still make sense in an electronic world where documents are created as searchable PDFs?

Is it time to eliminate tables and indices from the documentation deliverables, especially when they are not being printed?

All I had was an Excel file with around 20 messages that had the current error message and a description when/how the error message occurs. Feeling it would be a good exercise to spend the afternoon, I made my way towards the product development team. As we started the exercise, I realised that the team had no idea about error messages. They just got in touch with me because I was the technical writer. They had obviously thought that I was there just to correct the grammar and punctuation. I sat down and went through each scenario where the error message occurs and did what was required.

One typical user activity is to create a configuration file into the database by creating one or by importing an existing configuration. The dev team wanted me to look into the errors that occur during the import process. During that process, I identified issues with the sequence of error messages appearing because the inputs were not validated atomically. Rather, they were validated as a batch and you got a bucketful of error messages that should have been caught earlier. Being modal in nature, the user had no choice but to click the Ok or Cancel button to move on, which was too late. And these error messages really weren’t serving any purpose other than the developer’s need to say that the user made a error.

I explained that a good error message consists of three parts: what went wrong (a reason), why it was wrong (the problem), and what to do next (a call for action). Messages that follow this approach help the user move on with their flow with minimal interruptions. I also explained it was better to anticipate possible error scenarios and prevent them from happening rather than display an error message afterwards. As Alan Cooper mentions as a design principle in About Face 3, ‘Error message boxes stop the proceedings with idiocy and should be avoided.’ I suggested some solutions to avoid the error happening in the first place by performing validations then and there, rather than display them as a bunch of dialog boxes that force the user to click a button to get the error message out of the way.

Next up was the language used in the error message, which was the original reason why I was working with them in the first place. A question arose if the word ‘please’ had to be included in the error message like “Please enter an IP address” or should it just read “Enter an IP address”. I felt it was better to go without the word ‘please’ because it felt too patronizing and it did not add any value to the sentence. Finally I had reworded it to read as “The IP address cannot be blank. Enter a valid IP address. The IP address must be of the form of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”.

What really irked me was that the developers had no clue to user interface guidelines. They were using a Windows application, but they were not following the Windows User Experience Guidelines, but again even Microsoft doesn’t follow it at times.

Image via Flickr user:twindx

Chip in with your thoughts on error messages and designing for contingencies…

During this exercise, I have been finding interesting names and phrases. I pleaded mea culpa for using John Galt as a name in the database.

image courtesy:Ivan Walsh

Have you found any interesting names in any documentation? What kind of names do you use in your documentation?