Commentary Why manufacturers ignore the user edit. Atlas's "The User Edit": The Impact on Product Assessment John R. Hayes Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Innovation in Learning Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 jh50+@andrew.cmu.edu Introduction In his 1981 article, "The User Edit," Atlas said, "One of the best tools for improving manual usability is the 'user edit'; it is fast, cheap, easy, and powerful, yielding a lot of information for very little effort." Many of us share Atlas's assessment of the user edit as a very powerful and inexpensive tool for improving both products and product documentation. Certainly, there is extensive scientific evidence that methods like the user edit can provide valid and detailed information about human performance (Ericsson and Simon, 1991). Karen Schriver has accurately outlined the role that Atlas's article played in the extensive developments that have occurred in document design since the 1980s. However, despite the very encouraging conceptual and technical developments in document design, there is a problem. User testing has not had the kind of impact on product assessment that we had hoped for. As Atlas pointed out, the user edit was not a new idea when he described
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Atlas's “the user edit”: the impact on product assessment
Hayes, John R.
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 22 (3)
Association for Computing Machinery – Aug 1, 1998
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