Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Participants in a Usability Evaluation
general computer experience, e.g. length of experience with specific 
types of applications, frequency of use etc. 
specific experience with operating systems, hardware (e.g. mouse or key-
board) etc. 
experience with this and similar products 
Although Dumas & Redish do not explicitly say so, it is, of course, con-
ceivable that this information could be gathered or supplemented by means 
of interviews or questionnaires. Alternatively, this information could be 
elicited, for example, from a manager or someone who supervises and re-
cruits real users or possibly even someone who knows the technical skills of 
users, e.g. technical support engineers. 
of course, also suitable for creating profiles of the real users. 
product name 
general characteristics of user population 
characteristics of users that are relevant to the test 
which user characteristics should all users have and how will you define 
them?
which user characteristics will vary in the test and how will you define 
them?
We can expand this basic profile to produce a user profile questionnaire as 
shown in Appendix 1 Once this profile has been created for users, it is nec-
essary to create a similar profile for each of the potential participants. With 
this information, selecting those participants who most closely match the 
real users is a relatively straight-forward process. The data obtained for par-
ticipants can then be used to distribute participants with varying skills across 
a number of subgroups (Faulkner 1998:115). In our case, there will be two 
sub-groups: a control group and an experimental group. This is important 
because if one group has more participants with a particular type of skill 
relevant to the test than another group, the results may be distorted (
ibid.
).
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headings. Although this profile is intended for screening participants, it is, 
Dumas & Redish present a sample user profile which consists of five basic
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Assessing Usability