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Standards Development
The scope of this standard is requirements and guidelines for design, development, and evaluation of effective and usable User Assistance (UA) for mobile applications. The standard is designed to host a set of main principles to build an effective UA, focusing some key-issues specific to the mobile context: for example, the smaller screen-size of mobile devices. The standard covers both the transformation of user assistance content developed for other formats (responsive design) and the development of content specifically for mobile use. The standard hosts the main steps of the process for designing, testing, and maintaining of the UA contents. Specific clauses are dedicated on the definition of the target user (first time users or expert users) and the definition of the business use case addressed by the mobile application and the associated effects on UA contents. Another clause is focused on writing UA contents, integrated with any other type of multimedia contents (video, music, images). Another clause of the standard describes guidelines for the translation of UA contents. This standard is part of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 2651x series. This standard does not include definition (technical specification) of the visual, auditory, tactile, and other sensorial input and output methods for the mobile device interfaces.
A new ISO standard on UA is justified from the growth of the mobile applications market, requiring to technical communicators new skills about a specific business context that is pervasive in any business area and in daily work. Mobile devices have specific characteristics and user needs with information tailored for the specific mobile context. Also, because of frequent updates in mobile devices and their software, the user assistance content needs to be easily and frequently adapted to new systems. Mobile devices with small screens are a relatively new specialty for technical communicators: In this area, help contents are integrated with User eXperience (UX), with the User Interface (UI) of the mobile application. For this goal, methodologies and best practices should be well defined in a new standard.
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