Professional Development

Creating effective, efficient, and engaging professional documentation that is planned, adapted, designed, and customized for reader ease-of-use and understanding requires an in-depth understanding of the principles, best practices, and strategies for savvy documentation. This interactive, dynamic, and challenging workshop will help any BA transform written documentation into an engaging user experience.

 

• Understand techniques for building rapport with readers through written documentation
• Perform more efficient documentation planning, including audience assessment and content mapping
• Create engaging reader-focused documents with proven techniques for organization and design
• Maximize reader understanding through word- and sentence-level editing, vocabulary adaptation, and the application of active voice
• Design invaluable usability tests to ensure information accessibility (understanding, ease-of-use, and clarity)

Target Audience: For Business Analysts who are responsible for creating, organizing, designing, editing, and testing documentation products; for other professionals who perform a great deal of documentation in their workplaces.

Course Outline

Understand techniques for building rapport with readers through written documentation

• Introduction to technical communication/documentation
• Examples of document types most commonly created/maintained by BAs
• Matching documentation goal(s) and purpose(s) with document format

Perform more efficient documentation planning, including audience assessment and content mapping

• Review of the "Five Steps" of effective, efficient, and engaging documentation
• Audience analysis and assessment (incorporates small group exercise)
• Content planning (incorporates large group exercise)
• Strategies for drafting documentation

Create engaging reader-focused documents with proven techniques for organization and design

• Principles of organization (text vs. visual)
• Document design techniques (incorporates individual exercise, with large group de-brief)

Maximize reader understanding through word- and sentence-level editing, vocabulary adaptation, and the application of active voice

• Word-level editing best practices (individual and large group exercises)
• Sentence-level editing best practices (individual and large group exercises)
• Exercises for wordiness/redundancy, vocabulary usage, industry terminology/jargon, and active voice
• Recommendations for more effective proofreading

Design invaluable usability tests to ensure information accessibility (understanding, ease-of-use, and clarity)

• Overview of usability testing strategies (text-, expert-, and user-based methods)
• Review of specific usability test methods