I think I read somewhere (and in any case it matches my experience) that the first user will catch 50% of the problems and that with 5 users you can catch close to 90%. So human testing is not just invaluable, it's pretty cheap for the benefits it brings.

I was also going to post "this sounds like usability/user research".

But I guess we all re-discover things when we need to.

The biggest issue I've seen with tech docs is often expert users of a given tool or product are enlisted to write the docs, because of their expertise.

But then ironically they end up writing those docs for an audience that shares their level of expertise, rather than for the intended audience.

So you end up with lots of assumptions or leaps of logic in the docs that the intended audience can't follow.

There's the famous quip that Steve Jobs hated focus groups. What people miss is that he (and Apple overall) was heavy on UX testing.

I'd wager this is interesting, seems there are a lot of users here building things on the side (or main projects) that need clear UX if they're anything like me, they don't have that UX background to know the best practices. I know I just clicked your link anyway...

Yes very much so and thanks for the link.