Readability/Usability/Quality 1-99 (March 1999) by Gabriele Bock

Executives as well as customers demand quality from technical communicators. However, the requirements of both groups seem hard to combine: Executives want quality to be achieved inside the company by applying quality standards without causing any delay or additional costs. Establishing customer-based quality, on the other hand, usually demands extra money and extra time. Nevertheless both demands can and should be utilized for developing a user-oriented quality system.

Content Quality Needs more Support

Quality must be designed into a project, not evaluated only at the end. Letting customers find weak points of a product during usability testing is very expensive and time consuming. Therefore companies should help their technical communicators produce quality documents by

• developing company-specific style guides and checklists,
• offering training in company-specific technical writing,
• implementing review processes, and
• establishing feedback procedures between writers, editors, and reviewers

Company-specific checklists are condensed versions of these standards. They are helpful tools in the hands of skilful experts, because applying those mostly abstract categories requires profound knowledge about their scope of validity and relevance. The use of both style guides and checklists requires training and experience.

Managers tend to believe that writers only need to be told a few rules for clear writing, such as building short sentences or avoiding using more than two prepositions in the same sentence—if they are to produce documents that are easy to understand and translate into action by any user. If that were true, a lot of brilliant technical literature would be around, because by now many writers do know the basics of technical writing. What is missing is extensive training and – even more important – continuous feedback on the application of technical writing standards in everyday work. Many communicators think they consider these principles, but actually they do not.

Editing and Reviewing are Indispensable

Executives should be aware that reviewing is absolutely indispensable. Economic cuts often result in the reduction or even cancellation of editing and reviewing processes, justified by the argument that writers are supposed to deliver high quality documents anyway. Of course, any technical writer tries hard to meet this demand. But editing increases the quality of most documents, simply because someone else not only notices spelling errors and missing commas, but may also find omissions, vagueness, and problems in the sequence of operations.

Another important reason for editing is the necessity of adapting technical documents from different sources to one company standard. Documentation of large systems is usually produced by several communicators. Although all communicators are required to consider the company style guides, most guidelines leave room for interpretationand thereforethe documents some (permissible) variation. On the other hand, users expect documents to be structured, written, visualized, and composed exactly according to the same principles. Neither style guides nor checklists can be a substitute for experienced editors and reviewers.

End-Users Evaluate Quality

Only the user can tell you when your product is good enough. User satisfaction, the most important and most reliable indicator for quality, is frequently measured by simply asking how satisfied a person is with a product and its instructions. The significance of this measure is dubious, because you never know what users imply by "satisfaction": Are products and instructions actually meeting their demands? Are they judging by comparing your product to others with poorer performance? Are the happy they were able to manage at all? Do they want to please the company because they were awarded something? Maybe they just do not want to admit they did not understand the instructions and were not able to operate the product?

The only way to find out about usability, which is the prerequisite for user satisfaction and user performance, is usability testing. Committing to a user-centred design means incorporating usability engineering methods into product development right from the beginning, not waiting until the product is about to be marketed. Usability tests have already become common practice in many organizations. The tests should be performed by typical end users in their natural work environments. Test labs are second choice because working conditions in the real world are hardly as undisturbed and uninterrupted as in a quiet lab.

In addition to the user, a test manager, preferably an independent communication specialist, and a person recording comments, actions, and problems, are required for a reliable test performance. Technical writers should not be involved in final usability testing, because they will be tempted to explain the information they wrote and thus bias the test results.

Technical communicators need to keep in mind the demands of the users while they are writing. And they should realize they are supposed to write their sentences so that the user will be able to understand and act appropriately.

High quality documentation will be achieved only if sufficient means (staff and funds) are allocated to produce and control content quality:

"Ensuring quality means building the time for reviews into the project plan – both the technical and the editorial reviews. It means taking the time to assess the needs of the user and setting aside time to meet and come to agreement on how quality will be measured and by whom it will be measured." (Steele, Karen: In Search of Quality, Document, Newsletter of STC's Quality SIG, Vol 6, No. 2, Spring 1998 pp. 3 and 11)  

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