As a technical communicator, it’s your job to provide end users with all the information they need to safely, efficiently, and effectively use a product. To achieve this, your technical documentation not only needs to be correct and complete but it also needs to offer good usability. Let us see how a good usability test can help you.
It’s no secret that TCLoc students are an international group of professionals that have diverse backgrounds and expertise. Thanks to TCLoc instructor Kirk St.Amant, a small group of alumni were able to share their skills and knowledge with his usability and user experience students at Louisiana Tech University in the United States. In this interview, Kirk explains why he invited TCLoc alumni specifically to give guest lectures in his course, what insight they were able to share with his students, and why he plans to do it again in the future.
Your approach in optimizing your website or application has to be based on a set of objective tools that allow you to observe, measure, evaluate, and eventually make well-informed decisions for your next web project. This can be successfully achieved in two main directions. Firstly, you need to have a usability testing strategy in order to test your digital product before it is launched on a wide scale. Secondly, you need to be able to collect UX behavioral data, which is quantitative data to measure and analyze users’ interactions with your website or application.
We talk a lot about UX best practices in web design; and a lot about which software to use to improve UX in web design… But what about software design? It is clear; websites and software have different user interfaces; for different target groups. Besides, the software is not online, though this doesn’t mean user experience is not an important thing here as well. That being said, it is time to see the best practices to implement UX in software design.
As an English literature graduate who developed a rather unimaginable passion for technical writing many years ago, I was thrilled when I came across the Persona Method in Alan Cooper’s book “The Inmates Are Running The Asylum. Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy And How to Restore The Sanity” (1999).
Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses computer algorithms to improve automatically through experience. What if a program could adapt a graphical interface to your liking by using machine-learning technology? Well, this is what some companies are already doing. If a machine-learning program can learn from user behaviors, that is precisely why combining UX and machine learning makes sense. But it’s not as simple as it might sound. In this article, we will try to understand the challenges of machine-learning product design and how to overcome them.
Search experience optimization (SXO) is a popular topic that has emerged as a necessary consequence of our surfing habits. It merges two disciplines that we don’t necessarily associate, user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO). Although SEO is as old as the first website, search engines are constantly evolving, and SXO is the next step in that evolution. However, people may still have a hard time figuring out what SXO is really about. Let’s discover more about this practice.
According to the Web Accessibility Initiative’s website, “Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.” Through this article, you will find some tips and tricks in order to make your interface more accessible!
Regardless of the level at which you work in your company, you can take certain steps to improve your company’s ergonomic awareness. Whether you are a developer, a designer, or an executive, your actions and behaviour can turn the tides in favour of user experience (UX).
