This project was low budget in every dimension, but IвЂ™d researched the requirements thoroughly and felt like I understood the user well enough to design a system that would work for them. In that project, I was trying to learn if limited-resource clinics in Honduras that used a paper-based records with no automation could successfully adopt a small-scale computerized record keeping system.

The first example is an interface from the piClinic research project I conducted from 2016-2019. IвЂ™d like to share a couple of examples of knowing your audience and how this resulted in two different outcomes. The key to success with such approaches to minimalism is to know your audience. The reader/user is often in a hurry and thereвЂ™s no space to put any extra text.

While this approach applies to technical writing in general, it comes into sharp focus in user interface (UI) text where both time and space are in very short supply. When applied to editing, this works out to be something like, вЂњAfter writing, keep taking the words out until it stops making sense, then put the last word back in.вЂќ Less is more is a mantra frequently heard in technical writing. Continue reading вЂњDocumentation research requires more curiosity than moneyвЂќ So, I pivoted the design of the piClinic app to focus on reporting (as well as the storage and retrieval necessary to support that) to reduce their monthly reporting time from days to minutes. My assumption that storage was the problem to solve died during that research. Each month, each clinic would spend 2-3 days doing nothing but tabulating the activity of the clinic in their reports-something I hadnвЂ™t seen for myself in my earlier, more limited, experiences. It turned out that the real time-consumer in their process was reporting the data to the regional health offices from these documents. When I later actually sat down and interviewed the target users and watched what they did during the day and, more importantly, during the month, I learned that what I thought was their biggest obstacle, storage and retrieval, was not really a problem for them. I felt that, based on my first-hand experience, automating record storage would make it easier to store and retrieve the patient records. Clearly (to me) computerizing those records would improve things. While on a medical mission to a rural clinic in Honduras, I saw a mountain of paper patient records with a lot of seemingly valuable information in them that could never be tapped. My favorite research success story (perhaps because it turned out well) occurred while I was researching the piClinic project. Here are a couple of examples that come to mind from my experience. Sure, money helps, but success doesnвЂ™t always correlate with dollars spent. Continue reading вЂњTips for conducting documentation research on the cheapвЂќ If theyвЂ™re still stumped, you can help them along, but only after youвЂ™ve learned something. When the participant asks for help, such as, вЂњwhereвЂ™s the button or link to do вЂXвЂ™?вЂќ A trick I learned from more experienced usability testers is to ask them, вЂњwhere do you think it should be?вЂќ That way you learn something about the user experience, rather than just finishing the task without learning anything. Just remind yourself those moments are where the learning and discovery happen (after the injuries to egos and knees heal, anyway). Your participants will invariably misinterpret things and miss the вЂњobvious.вЂќ YouвЂ™ll need to suffer through this without prompting or cringing. After coming up with an answerable question, this is the next hardest thing to do-especially if people are reviewing something that you had a hand in writing or making.

Try to ask people who are close to your target audience, if you can, but anyone who is not you or in your group is better than you when it comes to helping you learn things that will help you answer your question. They do, as we found out, use the ToC, and we learned that it wasnвЂ™t in a way that we could count. Instead of asking, вЂњHow can we improve our documents?вЂќ I asked, вЂњWhat do users think of our table of contents (ToC)?вЂќ Most users donвЂ™t care about how we can improve our docs, unless theyвЂ™re annoyingly bad, so they donвЂ™t give it much thought. Your first questions will invariably be too big to answer all at once, so think, вЂњbaby steps.вЂќ Start with something simple (and then simplify it). The process is simple, yet thatвЂ™s what makes it difficult. In this post, I talk more about the process I applied. In my previous post, I presented some experiences with testing and the resulting epiphanies.

Whatson api for pictures