You’ve identified the document’s goal, analyzed your audience, and gathered your resources. You’ve outlined, written, and re-written, reviewed, spell-checked, and proofread. You’ve done everything you know to make sure you document meets requirements, that it attains the goal that you or your organization has set for it.

But can you be confident it will reach that goal? You can be if you take the next step: testing.

This presentation will explain the benefits of document testing, and outline four methodologies that anyone can implement to test their documentation. This session is appropriate for documentation project managers, editors, and technical writers.

The session will provide guidance and resources to help attendees create their own documentation testing programs. This will help improve the usability of their documentation, leading in turn to reduced customer service calls, increased customer satisfaction, and preventing costly rewrite and republish efforts.

The more elaborate the review cycle, the better the quality. Right? Well not when the cycle seems to leave everyone feeling a bit dizzy (end users included). This presentation offers tips and tricks to create a straight forward review process for high-quality, user-friendly documentation.

Simplified Technical English (STE) is a success story for the aerospace industry. Will a simplified English work for your industry as well? This session explores the rationale behind simplified languages, their advantages and their perennial challenges. It surveys controlled languages from their beginnings to the offerings in today’s marketplace. The session will also cover the questions you need to ask to determine what’s right for your situation. Do you need to simplify? Can you adapt an existing language or lexicon? Or should you define your own set of rules and phrases?  Where should you begin? What effort would be required?

Documentation and Training professionals are constantly challenged to deliver the highest quality deliverables with the least amount of resources. Lack of resources has discouraged many professionals from seeking documentation feedback from their most importance audience—the user. The user’s experience and perspective is essential to producing quality documentation. Resource constraints do not have to hinder your ability to gain user feedback. User feedback can take a variety of forms.

Whether it’s adding feedback mechanisms to your interface, gaining exposure through customer meetings, or conducting usability tests, there are a variety of ways to learn more about your user audience and their needs. This session will examine the driving factors that hinder the writer’s interaction with the user.

In addition, you will learn how to:

• Determine which methods work best in your environment
• Be creative in using existing applications at your workplace or tools available via the Internet to accomplish your goals
• Integrate user feedback into your deliverables
• Design feedback interfaces that encourage users to participate
• Become an advocate for the user
• Use your gold mine of user experience information to establish stronger intradepartmental relationships as well as build customer goodwill

The benefits of the user experience reach well beyond Documentation and Training groups. Whether you are new to the technical communication field or a seasoned writer, applying the methods highlighted in this workshop should reap handsome rewards for you and your audience.