Harnessing Analytics to Measure the-efficacy-of-user-documentation
Flash! User documentation can be engaging! Here’s a look at the future of technical communications. I really enjoyed this article in UXMatters by Debarshi Gupta Biswas and Samiksha Chaudhuri.
By marrying the superlative power of analytics with the underlying principles of user experience, technical communicators can assess specific user behaviors that occur as users read content. As the technical communication industry evolves and goes global, technical communicators are developing content in a way that fosters increasing engagement with the user population. To accomplish this, the industry is adopting a more user-centered outlook. By leveraging analytics, technical communicators can quickly determine what information users search for most frequently and which information sets they largely disregard. To echo the words of Tristan Bishop, a senior content strategist:
“It won’t be long before you’ll know which of your topics are making a positive difference, which need some help, and which can simply disappear. It will soon be painfully obvious which team members are writing the high-impact topics, which are writing the unintelligible topics, and which are writing the irrelevant topics.”