Comprehensibility as an economic factor

How can you guarantee a clearly understandable user manual? Is it even possible to measure the quality of technical documents or does comprehensibility merely depend on the reader? To answer these questions for the Porsche AG, content analysis provider semiotis³ developed a model to help measure the quality of documents.

Text by Angelika Eybe,  David Messelken

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Comprehensibility as an economic factor

Quality management in technical documentation

So, how do you answer the question "How comprehensible is this text?” Is it very good, quite good or maybe poor? The answer will vary depending on the individual’s linguistic perception. As a result, individual preference plays a great part in defining the quality of a text. Linguistic subjectivity therefore represents a large obstacle in the way of quality management for documentation processes. Individual understanding of language influences evaluation, making it difficult to assign documentation tasks to several people without muddying the message that the documentation has to convey. In this context, most known quality management methods pay little attention to measuring the quality of a source text. At most, these approaches consider structural aspects, but they do not take into account the comprehensibility of the text, that is to say ...
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