Minutes of the Presentation at Adobe on 30th August

Date: August 30, 2008

Time: 10.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

Venue: Adobe Systems

Session 1: “Documentation Document usability testing - How to kick start” by Rajdeep Gupta.

Session 2: "Ten tips for enhancing productivity at your workplace: Tools and Processes that can be used to get the most out of your working hours" by Preran Kurnool and “Getting the most out of your help projects: Tips and Tricks with RoboHelp and Acrobat" by Mallika Yelandur.

Rajdeep Gupta started the day’s sessions after setting the meeting’s agenda and introducing the participants.

Rajdeep noted that documentation usability testing could enable users to find information to accomplish a particular task or employ a particular tool in an easy and efficient manner. He emphasized that performing usability testing on documents requires a good understanding of the users and their constraints.

Technical writers and in-house resources could do the document usability testing within a structured and detail-oriented framework. Document usability testing also involves best practices, protocols, understanding and evaluation of user feedback.


Rajdeep also detailed the document usability testing process that he employed, and explained how the testing environment was set up, the resources were identified, and the time and budget were planned. He also presented a classification of “usability errors” that he found while performing document usability testing.


Event: Bangalore TW Meetup Session-Supported by STC India

He added that the errors found should be quantified to make technical documentation more usable.


In the second session of the day, Preran provided answers to how Adobe Acrobat Professional 9 could efficiently manage document reviews. Reviewers could collaborate on the review process by seeing and building on other reviewers' comments.

The comments can be uploaded to a central repository and sorted by author, date, or page. A Review Tracker monitors the progress of shared reviews. The tool allows participants to e-mail reviewers, send e-mail reminders, or invite additional participants to a review.

Mallika introduced the attendees to RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), which allows technical writers to convert existing WebHelp files created with RoboHelp 7 to a powerful Adobe AIR application.

After the WebHelp is generated, technical writers can run the AIR package to develop an AIR application and send it to the users as a single file (.air). The application allows the users to add comments to the Help file and create context-sensitive help.

The meeting ended with a vote of thanks by Rajdeep.