Length: Two days
Fee: $975.00 USD

Who should attend?

  • Technical communicators
  • Interaction and web designers
  • Instructional designers and 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

Upcoming workshop:

Description

Do you want to develop content that your users find relevant to their needs? Do you really know what your users need to know? Are you ready to start critical conversations with your users? Is your company questioning the cost of producing user information? Are you thinking about migrating your content to the DITA standard but don’t know where to start?

If these questions are on your mind and on the mind’s of your senior management, you need to learn about user and task analysis.

Before you can develop effective user-goal-oriented procedures, you need to understand who your users are, what their goals are, and what tasks they need to perform to reach those goals. Without this understanding, you may tell users how your products work but not how to use them to get their real work done.

Start by analyzing your own content to decide what it is really communicating. Learn the basics of conducting a user and task analysis and then apply what you learn to restructuring your content.

Use the annotated topic list to plan your new content or migrate your current content to a new user and task-based information model. Relate conceptual and reference information to tasks and connect tasks to the larger user goals.

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.

People who have attended this workshop come away with a new vision of their roles in information development and how to communicate their value to their management.

You will learn to

  • Evaluate your own manuals to decide if they address user goals and tasks
  • Decide what you need to learn about your users
  • Create a plan for a user and task analysis
  • Describe user personas to guide your content analysis
  • Develop a user/task matrix to analyze your task results
  • Create an annotated topic list to plan content
  • Learn how to relate concepts and reference information to user tasks
  • Consider how to present user tasks as part of larger user goals