Want your legal forms, inserts, and disclosures user-tested ?

[Jim Stratman <jstratma -at- CARBON -dot- CUDENVER -dot- EDU>]

Dear TECHWHIRLERS:

Beginning in August, 1998, the M.S. in Technical Communication Program at
the University of Colorado at Denver will offer a course in Usability
Testing (at the graduate level).  One of the areas we emphasize in our
curriculum, and that we will focus in this course, is the improvement of a
broad range of legal documents, including (but not limited to) such things as:

--health and financial risk disclosures
--warnings on (or inside of) packaging
--patient package inserts for pharmaceuticals and home care health products
--tax documentation
--court orders
--wills
--banking/loan transactions
--insurance policies
-- etc.

Here's the pitch: For the fall 1998 course, we are now inviting both public
and private sector organizations to participate in this course, by providing
actual documents for which they would like user-testing and related
comprehensibility evaluations to be performed in our labs.  While we would
not charge organizations for the tests and evaluations/reports themselves,
we may require some monetary support for securing and paying test
participants. Note that we are interested both in consumer-type documents,
as well as documents for more specialized audiences/technicians.
Additionally, we are equally interested in online and traditional hard copy
documents.

If you or your organization think you might be interested in supplying such
documents to our Program--in exchange for obtaining the written results of a
highly competent user-testing and evaluation--please contact me right away.

Please be sure to reply to my personal email (below), not to this list.

Sincerely,

Professor James F. Stratman, Director
Technical Communication Program
University of Colorado at Denver
Plaza Building, Suite 102-B
Campus Box 176
Denver, Colorado 80217-3364
EMAIL: jstratma -at- carbon -dot- cudenver -dot- edu
(303) 556-2884
http://www.cudenver.edu/public/techcomm/home.html