At Firehead, we’re extremely proud of the exceptional quality authors we’ve gathered in our training academy. They are top names and thought leaders in their fields.
Yves Pierrot is our Usability Techniques Applied to Technical Communication course author. He’s a recognised expert in the study of user expertise and its application to Technical Communication or Usability.
Why is this course important?
Learning how to understand your audiences taps into vast knowledge about your documentation. This skill also prepares you to tackle any strategic challenges that may arise in your work. Understanding your audience is the foundation of technical communication because it provides the insights you need to communicate what they need to understand.
However, you need to know how to efficiently and safely extract these insights. This course teaches you everything about investigation, enabling you to confidently find the answers you seek. With this knowledge, you can assume roles in technical communication that involve more ownership, decision-making, and leadership than ever before. Forget the fear of being unsure about what to do next.
How will this information help you five years from now?
It’s hard to put a price on the value of being able to understand your audience – what they need and what their unique perspective is each situation. But we know it’s invaluable for successful communication.
As the world progresses with AI and machine interfaces, this understanding of human audience needs is only going to gain value with the human-machine interfaces.
Here’s a little bit about the author
Yves Pierrot started his career over 25 years ago as cognitive engineering consultant. He is now a technical communicator and translation coordinator. Since his masters in Cognitive Psychology he’s worked in software application teams in a wide variety of sectors including: content management, microelectronics, medical devices, electrical devices, and banking.
He’s passionate about the cognitive psychology of expertise: how expertise appears, how it evolves, and how it can be studied to improve our communication with our audience. Yves always meets directly with his audience for interviews or other types of research, where he can use his skills for the benefit of his clients and employers, and continue learning about the cognition of human activity.
Here’s a little bit about the Usability Techniques Applied to Technical Communication course
Who is this course for?
This course is intended for technical communicators of all levels of experience who want to improve
their content through direct contact with their audience. This applies to any field of application as well as any type of audience.
What will you learn?
At the end of this course:
- You will have a more precise view of the role of usability in technical communication.
- You will know what can a usability investigation technique bring you that classical technical communication methodology could not.
- You will know which usability investigation technique you should perform depending on your specific situation.
- You will be able to perform audience interviews and observations: how to prepare them, how to carry them out and how to analyze your results with the objective of improving all aspects of your technical communication (content and delivery).
- You will have enough high-level knowledge of testing methodologies (experimental methodology) to know whether or not you could benefit from it.
A detailed description of such a methodology would be the subject of a separate course.
How will you learn?
- A series of videos will walk you step by step through every concept and technique description, at your own pace.
- If you follow the order of the chapters proposed in the structure of this course, each step appears as a logical prolongation of the previous step, thus facilitating comprehension and memorizing. But you can also focus on specific chapters in the order you choose.
- At the end, you will have access to a checklist to use as a reference in your own practice.
Download our free guide to Usability Investigation Techniques for Technical Communication –
Check out our new Usability Techniques Applied to Technical Communication course.
View all of our career courses on firehead-training.net
Our guide provides an overview of why it’s important, and give you arguments you can use to sell them to your boss for future cost savings.
