Extended Abstract: Delightful Documentation? Improving Documentation Quality with the Kano Model

A focused, clearly defined, and reader-derived definition of documentation quality is a critical component in collecting meaningful and actionable feedback, creating reliable documentation metrics, and teaching technical communication students how to write quality documentation. To determine how readers define high-quality documentation, I carried out two studies using a set of empirically tested information quality dimensions. In the first study, I found that readers define high-quality documentation as being accurate, relevant, easy to understand, and accessible. In the second study, I used the Kano Model of customer satisfaction to determine how robust this proposed definition of documentation quality was. The results indicated that readers do define high-quality documentation as being accurate, easy to understand, and accessible; however, in this study, documentation completeness replaced documentation relevance. The results of these two studies can provide a sound theoretical basis for focusing on certain dimensions of documentation quality to increase reader satisfaction when writing and teaching. Further research should be done to expand the use of the Kano Model in the field of documentation quality.