Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Understanding Users 
If usability is the measure of how easily and effectively people can use 
something (in this case, a user guide), a key component in understanding it 
is studying the interaction between humans and user guides. Since usability 
refers to the extent to which people find something easy to use, to under-
stand usability we must first understand the users who are the ultimate 
judges of usability. In this chapter we will examine ways of modelling the 
human cognitive system and discuss how it works. Human sensory, cognitive
and learning processes will be examined as well as the way we remember
information. The various processes involved in
assimilating
and
interpreting
information will also be explained. 
Usability 
A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work 
than is strictly necessary” (Raskin 2000:6)
We have previously discussed how making user guides more accessible and 
usable is a primary objective for technical communicators. It would be easy 
to produce a simple working definition of usability such as “ease of use”. 
However, such a definition by no means explains the true nature of usabil-
ity and the factors affecting it. 
Another common fallacy is to confuse usability and usefulness. While os-
tensibly related, they are poles apart in terms of their relationship to prod-
ucts. Usefulness refers to the potential uses users can find for something 
whereas usability refers to how well us ers can use it (Landauer 1995:4; Ehn &
Löwgren 1997:301; Dumas & Redish 1993:5). 
However, defining usability as a measure of how well users can use 
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something is a slight over-simplification. In the ISO 9241-11 standard

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Understanding Users 
gonomic requirements for office work
with visual display terminals”, us-
ability is defined as: 
The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve 
specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency , and satisfaction in a speci-
fied context. 
In other words, usability refers to how well a given user will perform a 
given task at a given time. There are difficulties, however, in this definition 
with regard to the phrase “specified users”. A number of theorists maintain 
that attempting to define the concept of a user is highly problematic and 
possibly even futile (Ehn & Löwgren 1997:299; Bannon 1991:26-27). This 
is because there may be a vast number of different people, all with different 
backgrounds, knowledge, abilities, skills and patterns of use who will all be 
using the product. It would be prohibitively difficult to profile each type of 
user in terms of the aforementioned criteria. In view of this, Ehn & Löw-
gren (
ibid.
) propose that our focus should be on the situation of use, i.e. 
where, when and how the user uses the product. 
Dumas & Redish provide a definition of usability which is less specific 
than the ISO 9241 definition given above but which nonetheless provides 
additional insight. According to their definition, “usability means that the 
people who use the product
can do so 
quickly and easily
to accomplish 
their own tasks
[emphasis in original] (1999:4). Here, the crucial factor is 
the fact that users are using the product to perform 
another 
task. The use of 
the product is secondary to a user’s true intention. We can see, therefore, 
that usability does not depend on the product 
per se
, but rather on the 
people who use it. A usable product is one which is appropriate to the ttasks
users want to carry out. Indeed, according to Faulkner (1998:7) “the very 
best systems and the very best interfaces will be overlooked entirely by the 
user” and ideally, all the user should see is the task and not the system. 
Dumas & Redish (1999:4-6) examine the relationship between usability 
and users under the following headings: 
Usability means focussing on users 
People use products to be productive 
Users are busy 
Users decide how usable a product is 
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Usability