Documentation usability testing
What & why
Everybody has a different brain & a different view—and everybody learns differently.
We need to test our documentation, just like we test our apps, to confirm that the instructions work the way we expect.
Without proper documentation usability testing how do we know that the instructions work?
Set up
- Choose 2 complicated patterns, ideally patterns with patterns inside
- Make sure your pattern library is running on your computer
- Set up a dummy page in your website for testing: name it
doc-testing.html
; apply yourdefault
layout - Open the
/doc-testing/
page in your browser
Execution
-
Ask 2 different people to come to your computer & add the patterns to the
doc-testing.html
page -
Observe their process and record any problems that arise—you can also ask the tester to verbalize their process