Yoel Strimling has been spinning straw into gold for over 25 years and currently works as the Senior Technical Editor/Documentation Quality SME for Ceva Inc. in Ra’anana, Israel. Over the course of his career, he has successfully improved the content, writing style, and look and feel of his employers’ most important and most used customer-facing documentation by researching and applying the principles of reader-oriented documentation quality. Yoel is an STC Associate Fellow and a member of tekom Israel. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Delightful Documentation? Improving Documentation Quality with the Kano Model

You know what your readers really want from the documentation you send them? You might think you are giving them high-quality documentation, but do your readers agree with you? Have you asked them? The Kano Model is used in many industries during the product/service development and design phases to determine which proposed features will have the greatest effect on customer satisfaction. This talk presents the results of two applied research studies, and proposes a focused, clearly defined, and reader-derived definition of documentation quality based on empirically tested information quality categories and dimensions. It will provide you with a sound theoretical basis for focusing on certain dimensions of documentation quality in your writing to increase reader satisfaction. This talk is intended for people who want to write docs that make their readers happy. And who doesn’t want happy readers?

In this session, attendees will learn:

In this talk, we will get some clear, research-based takeaways that can be used to :

• Collect meaningful and actionable feedback
• Create clear and reliable methods and metrics for measuring documentation quality
• Provide guidelines for use in academic technical communication courses to teach students about real-life, reader-oriented documentation quality measures
• Improve the customer experience though better content!