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Our mix of services has always been driven by wanting to help customers make their products easier to use, no matter where in the world they are. The combination of technical authoring, translation and software localization expertise has worked well. But software companies are increasingly concerned about making their software as easy to use as possible before spending money on explaining how to use it in online help or technical manuals. We couldn’t agree more, and for some time we have suggested they get some usability testing done so that they can make improvements and focus the documentation effort on the more complex tasks and concepts. “Where do we get usability testing from?” they asked.
So we decided to bring software usability expertise into our own team, and partnered with Rachel Potts to launch 3di Software Usability. This adds a crucial component to the skills software development teams need to get high quality products to market — the ability to design and run usability tests, and incorporate findings into the software. Videos of usability tests record the user’s screen, keystrokes, mouse movements and clicks, and audio records their experience, as they “think aloud” during the test. This is powerful viewing for any software development team, and the results can be used to improve existing software, as part of the development process for new software, or as a way of establishing how and where to focus efforts on developing user assistance. We’ve taken care to ensure that our usability expertise is accessible, too, with starter packages of usability testing taking just a few days to complete.
Visit www.3diusability.com for more detail about 3di Software Usability.