Re: Measuring effectiveness/quality of docs

[Dick Gaskill <dickg -at- AG3D -dot- COM>]

Beth,

Three answers, all simple, only #3 easy to accomplish.

1.  Do formal usability testing on your documentation.  There are
numerous courses and books on this subject.
2.  Talk to your customers, even if you have to go through marketing
and/or sales to do it.  If possible, actually visit a customer site and
talk to the users.  Make sure you talk to all levels of users that use
your docs, so you can check each area of documentation (installation,
configuration, operation, troubleshooting, programming, etc.).
3.  Talk to your support engineers.  Ask them if they've had any "bugs"
reported about the documentation.  Ask them to check with the customers
too.  This may be easier than getting customer feedback via marketing or
sales.

HTH

Dick Gaskill


> ----------
> From:         Beth Kane[SMTP:bkane -at- ARTISOFT -dot- COM]
> Reply To:     Beth Kane
> Sent:         Friday, February 13, 1998 3:46 AM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      Measuring effectiveness/quality of docs
>
>      A friend of mine who hasn't yet subscribed to TECHWR-L has asked
> me to
>      pose the following question to you. Please send any thoughts to
> me and
>      I'll forward them to him.
>      Thanks very much.
>      Beth Kane
>      bkane -at- artisoft -dot- com
>      ------------------
>      ?=
>      Does anyone have any ideas about how we can "measure" the
>      effectiveness/quality of our information development work
> efforts? For
>      example, are there ways we can quantify the number of errors in
> docs,
>      customer usability/satisfaction, etc.?
>
> ~~
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