INTRODUCING EMAIL LESSONS TO WRITERS

(This introduction is not part of the usability lessons. It describes the development and use of email lessons as a training technique at Modular Mining Systems, Inc. )

What Are Email Lessons?

Email lessons are a new training technique for promoting professional development at Modular Mining Systems. Rather than requiring employees to attend classes for training, students receive a lesson in their Inbox each morning. I call this method Desktop Training.

Each lesson presents one or two concepts and is designed to be read in ten to fifteen minutes. Lessons include introductory text with links to relevant web content, and require no response or additional work from recipients other than reading the lesson content. Linked web pages contain the entire lesson for that link; students do not need to follow further links on the web page to complete the lesson.

Occasionally a lesson includes a Reference Material section that contains optional web reading for more in-depth studies.

Mailing the Lessons

For usability training, I developed a series of twenty daily online lessons. This series of lessons was mailed on three separate occasions.

I sent the first mailing in early 2000 to a new project development group that consisted of software developers and several levels of management. This mailing served as a test run and was evaluated by the developers and approved by project management.

Several months later I mailed the same lessons to software developers who were working on other projects.

Finally, in 2001, I sent a third mailing to software developers who had been hired after the second mailing ended.

Lesson Format for Desktop Training

The lessons set consists of plain text mailings of the following:

• a welcome letter
• twenty daily lessons
• a feedback report that lists comments and suggestions received from participants

I use plain text to ensure readability by most email programs, and include a link for comments at the bottom of each page.

For presentation on this web site, I added site template graphics and links to the previous and next topic. I also added an introductory topic addressed to writers, a features and pitfalls topic, and a table of contents.

Why Were the Usability Email Lessons Implemented?

The idea for the usability training grew from a business need -- to reduce the amount of user documentation required for a new development project. Considerable effort is expended by the documentation group explaining how to use the company's software. This workload could be reduced if new software were easier to use.

Because I was developing a guide for writing functional specifications for the new project's software modules, I was also asked to write a usability specification. While researching usability concepts I soon realized that I could save time and work by providing usability training to our employees, rather than requiring them to meet a specification that included design considerations that were probably new to them.

(Usability training is generally not a major part of a software developer's formal education -- developers are primarily hired to write code that works.)

For a discussion of the general business value of usability, see
Lesson 17 - The Business Case for Usability.
(This topic provides a good executive summary for management.)