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Subject:Re: STC competition judges with a usability bent From:"Kathleen L. Root" <klr -at- AISINC -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 2 Feb 1994 17:49:06 EST
Brian Daley said....
Are there any organizations that have usability
competitions for manuals?
I've always thought it was funny that I could
have an award-winning manual,
but the judge is judging the manual by
itself, not with the product it's
supposed to document.
What if I forgot to warn the user about a
life-threatening situation in my
award-winning manual?
___________________________________________
An additional thought about usability issues...
I'm fairly proud of the way we've documented a
complicated, somewhat inconsistent interface.
Will a judge realize what we accomplished without
the software? But then again, our software runs
on our vision computers in conjunction with a
host computer so its not possible to hand off a
disk.
I think this brings up a difficult question - what
do you want from the judging... an award, positive
feedback? I did have the satisfaction of testing
our docs with my 13 year old daughter and they
passed. Not very scientific, though.
Pleasssse don't tell me to try and get software
engineering to do a better job with interfaces,
I'm trying.
Kathy Root
Technical Writer
Applied Intelligent Systems, Inc.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
klr -at- aisi -dot- com ......standard employee disclaimer
