Grassroots Documentation Testing 

After reading Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug, Kristi Leach and her tech comm department decided to adapt Krug’s do-it-yourself website testing method to test documentation, with an important variable: they tested on co-workers. The resulting benefits were not the ones she expected, nor were the challenges quite the same as the ones covered in Krug’s book.

Join us Thursday, April 28th to learn from Kristi about grassroots documentation testing in your workplace. She’ll address topics such as using available resources, testing your content, using collaboration as a problem-solving tool, and producing solutions can use in your documentation efforts.

For the exercise portion of the session, we’ll practice writing scenarios to test user assistance content on co-workers. Then we’ll have a brainstorming session to share success stories and discuss solutions for the most critical challenges to do-it-yourself documentation testing.

This discussion is an opportunity to supplement the expert resources on usability with some grassroots collaboration. We’ll work through an exercise to demonstrate some challenges, then discuss solutions for the most severe issues; a debriefing à la Krug. After the session, Kristi will blog about our group solutions. (This part of the session was inspired by Tom Johnson’s collaborative posts over at IdRatherBeWriting.com.)