Heuristics in Tech Writers Training

Cognitive pathway and heuristic evaluation are two methods used to assess systems’ usability based on cognitive engineering, which uses cognitive psychology knowledge to understand the human mind’s skills and limitations to develop user-friendly systems.

The cognitive pathway is the evaluation of a system's ease of learning by exploring its interface in which the user's tasks are broken down into actions necessary to perform a given task, and heuristic evaluation is the evaluation of the usability level of the user interfaces through basic rules.

Although these two methods are part of the UX discipline, we Tech Writers also use them. Not ipsis litteris, obviously, but abstractly because of what originates them: cognition and heuristics.

Cognition is the psychological function that acts in the acquisition of knowledge through logical associations. Heuristic is the human capacity characterized as discovery and/or invention focused on solving problems through experience and creativity.

The documentation requests we receive do not always come with in-depth technical and functional specifications. It is not uncommon for us to venture into the system alone to learn and discover how, when, where and why certain functionality is being launched.

In our learning and discovery process, we put ourselves in the user's shoes and decompose the necessary actions to carry out their tasks. We test patterns, experiment with basic (and alternative) flows using our experience and creativity to produce complete and detailed documentation.

As we develop knowledge in the system we document, we mainly use the recognition heuristic based on the uptake of memories and the recognition of alternatives. We start having dèja-vu when we perceive similarities between the functionalities we already documented.

Even if our recognition process becomes more organic and fluid, we still smell rats: why does this form have an extra field? What happens if I fill this field with another value?

Tech Writers need to be partly laymen, as there has to be a certain lack of recognition for further inferences to exist. That is why having no background in systems technology can, contrary to popular belief, be extraordinarily favorable for Tech Writers’ training.