English 421: Technical Writing

 

Okay this week my article is about usability and documentation. This is because I cannot seem to find any information on what our article for the week should be about. Anyway, the article I found talks about usability, testing, and documentation. The article gives definitions for all three of these words, and I think the definition of usability is rather good. It basically says that usability is all about making the product easy as possible for the users to use. The article isn’t really just an article it is also a sales pitch to use the company’s services to create technical documentation. Even so the article does a great job of explaining what usability, testing, and documentation consist of. The article even explains some of the steps necessary to complete these tasks. But since this article is also a sales pitch they make it seem like documentation is where the developer wants to spend most of the money when creating a product. This article explains the importance of usability, testing, and documentation and explains how they are usually the most underrated steps of the development process. It goes on to say that marketing usually calls these things satisfiers, which means that they are not necessary for the product to be a good product. After explaining these flaws that industry has it goes into detail of each step. It says that usability is the most important, because if the product does not do what the user wants the product will end up sitting on a shelf collecting dust. For testing it talks about how testing is needed to fix usability problems and to collect data on creating the documentation for the product. Last, for documentation the article talks about how the documentation must provide help for areas that users would have questions about and not just documentation on every little detail of the product.

 

Thomas