Approach
When developing new technology or software, identifying the potential users of a system and their attributes is necessary in order to ensure that said technology or software will be more user friendly.
During this development, the user analysis is the basic research phase which takes place before actual drafting of the technology's technical documentation. In this way, it's typically the first step of the document composition process. Such an analysis is intended to result in tacit knowledge, or a set of facts regarding the users' values, behaviors, knowledge of the documentation and product and motivation for using said documentation and product. Revealing the tacit knowledge of users' activities, as opposed to the simple operations which a given technology can perform, is often referred to as an unspoken but understood trick of the trade for the technical communicators who conduct user analyses.
A good technical communicator will perform a user analysis aimed at finding both what exactly a user needs to do, and what the user would do with the technology in question. Some experts in the field of user analysis have emphasized the importance of understanding the transfer of learning during this process, though the concept itself is a controversial one.
Read more about this topic: User Analysis
Famous quotes containing the word approach:
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)