Finding Information

I conducted a usability study of an integrated hardware and software system used in testing electronic circuit designs. This testing was performed before the circuit designs went into actual silicon production. Finding bugs in circuit designs, early in the design process, saved a lot of time, expense, and rework, compared to finding bugs in actual silicon that has already gone into production.

My usability study consisted of interviewing customers about how they use our electronics design validation system and its documentation, and then observing the processes customers use at their work sites.

The documetation for this system consisted of a set of 6 technical manuals, including an installation guide and a user guide for the hardware, installaton guide and user guide for the software, a system administartor's guide, and a troubleshooting guide.

The usability study revealed that users had a difficult time using the document set. Because the sotware and hardware were tightly integrated as a complete system, users often had to flip through two or even three binders, to find the information they needed at each step in their design and test processes. The documents were organized around the separate pieces of the product, instead of oriented around customer processes and procedures.

As a result if this usability study, I helped put together a team of engineers and technical writers to reform our documentation. I was the project lead on this effort.

Project tasks I either perfomed myself, or supervised and coordinated as team lead, included:

• Re-organize user manuals around customer tasks, instead of around product features.
• Change the method of distributing manuals, from printed in binders, to online.
• Create online help content about every field and every button in every GUI window in the software.
• Create a logical, consistent structure of unique link names for every help file.
• Ensure that each link name is placed in the proper location within the underlying GUI code.
• Link every GUI help file to the correct page in the correct user guide, where the specific GUI window is used within the context of a typical user process.
• Create a front page that lets users select from and search within any of the online manuals.