Led by Bill Hackos
Duration: two days

Receive JoAnn Hackos's User and Task Analysis for Information Design book free with registration to this workshop.

Before we can develop effective user-goal-oriented procedures, we need to understand who our users are, what their goals are, and what tasks they need to perform to reach those goals. Without this understanding, the procedures we develop often tell users how the products or systems work but not how to use them to get their work done. In fact, we've all had the experience of going to manuals or help systems only to find details about performing individual procedures with no help explaining how all the details fit together to accomplish your task.

How-to-do-it information is what users most often seek first. Procedures are the cutting edge of a user's goals and the heart of a good manual. The procedure is a well-formulated plan for carrying out a task, usually arranged in the most effective step-by-step sequence. Users must get all the information they need to carry out the task and, ideally, nothing that's irrelevant. Conceptual explanations may get basic ideas across, and reference sections may define commands, but procedures distill the skills of expert users in a way that enables novices and intermediates to acquire those skills quickly-at the moment they need them.

This workshop focuses on practical techniques to learn about your users, their goals, and their work, and create a model that will serve as a decision-making tool throughout the life-cycle of your project or product. You'll learn how to make the most of your user information resources, whether based on site visits and contacts, in-house subject matter experts, or even, when you must, on your own guesstimates. A guided sequence of exercises will step you through the process of modeling users and their tasks and deciding on the methods that are most appropriate to your situation. You'll also receive a workbook amply illustrated with good and bad examples.

Who should attend?

• Technical communicators
• Interface designers
• Web designers
• Instructional designers
• Trainers
• Editors and others involved in quality assurance
• Usability specialists
• Project managers
• Others interested in ensuring that users get the information they need to be productive and successful

You will learn to

• Apply inexpensive usability methods that yield critical design guidelines
• Employ user workflow and taskflow to plan efficiently
• Create a user model you can use during the life of the project
• Make task analysis a tool for rapid prototyping
• Conduct interactive interviews to discover what users really need
• Create a user study plan from a standard template
• Stay focused on users' issues
• Decide who to study and how many
• Choose the right technique to fit your time and budget
• Turn tasks into procedural instructions
• Write explanations that inform without distracting or confusing users
• Layer information for differing user needs and interests