Interwoven Session on June 16, 2007

I had the privilege to attend the STC Learning Session on Usability conducted at Interwoven (June 16, 2007), and am sharing the session’ gist with you.

The first speaker was Sherrill Packebush, a User Experience Analyst with Interwoven who delivered a presentation on HCI and Tech Communication. She gave a basic idea of what HCI is, responsibilities and the role of tech communicators in designing.

Sherill said HCI does a lot of research on the designing and development activities. She also shared her experiences in creating wireframes, prototypes and all. In addition, She highlighted some case studies on usability namely on Amazon. com, move.com and staples.com.

She pointed out that one of the distinguished companies had to shell out $ 900, 000 on Usability issues for they ended up doing the test on the engineering team and never thought of performing it on end-users. Finally, she discussed some usability problems that are been encountered frequently.

Next was Suman Kumar, writer with DELL who delivered a session on Contingency Design, its importance and writers role in it. Citing examples, Suman said that Error messages should be treated as educating the customers. He also cited some practical examples wherein vague error messages have proved costly to the flagships of the product.

In addition, Suman thought that the following points in mind while writing error messages. Error Messages need to be identifiable, accurate, understandable, succinct, correct measure and explain what went wrong. According to Suman, writers are the perfect customer advocates and should play key roles in getting the customer requirements picture clearer to the design and development team. In a nutshell, always try to be on the user's shoes when writing error messages.

The session concluded with a Q & A.