Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Post-Task User Satisfaction Survey 
As we discussed earlier, usability is measured not just on the basis of how 
well and how quickly users work with software, but also whether or not 
they like using the software. Subjective user assessment is a way of deter-
mining user attitudes to software – just because users ccan use software does 
not mean that they like it and that the software is considered usable. This is 
important for a number of reasons. In discretionary use scenarios, i.e. cases 
where users cchoose to use software, low levels of user satisfaction will 
prompt users to abandon a particular product in favour of another product. 
In mandatory use scenarios, i.e. cases where users m
must use the software to 
do their jobs, low satisfaction leads to absenteeism, high staff turnover and a 
variety of other complaints from an unhappy workforce. 
For the purposes of this study, a modified version of QUIS was used 
which omitted the questions relating to 
system capabilities
,
multimedia
,
voice recognition
,
virtual environments
,
Internet access
and 
software instal-
lation
. A number of questions from other sections were also deleted because 
they were not deemed to be applicable to this study. In addition, certain 
sections and questions were reworded to make them more specific to this 
study. A number of questions were added in order to explicitly test the hy-
pothesis of the study. Such questions included: 
Language used in the user guide is consistent 
Language used in the user guide is repetitive 
These questions sought to determine whether inconsistency or repetition 
were negative factors which affected the levels of satisfaction among users 
gued/confused by inconsistent formulations). 
Post-Test Survey 
As discussed early one of the assessment criteria with which usability is 
measured in this study relates to how well users remember information over 
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used to record each individual instance of an event. As each instance is ob-
(i.e., users may become irritated by excessively repetitive text or fati-
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Experiment to Test the Impact of Iconic Linkage
time. Of course, the ideal method for testing retention of information over 
time is to ask users to use the system again using slightly different tasks 
which draw on the same information. However, the expense and difficulty 
in securing participation for an additional test session proved to be prohibi-
tive in this study.
Instead, a variation of the interviewer-administered questionnaire (see 
test tasks, a series of 15 questions (13 of which were multiple choice) was 
compiled to test how much users remembered after completing the tasks. 
The multiple-choice format was chosen to facilitate “cueing” or recogni-
tion of answers. While this may seem erroneous in that it “gives” users the 
answers, it emulates the type of prompting provided by visual clues on-
screen in the software such as menu options, icons, dialog boxes etc. Un-
fortunately, time constraints mean that we cannot determine which answers 
were “guessed” or triggered by recognition and which ones the testers ac-
tually knew without any cueing. Nevertheless, both types of answer com-
bine to show how much information is retained over time. The actual 
questions used in the post-test survey are presented in Appendix 5.