Job Aids Basics, 2nd Edition

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Testing and Implementation

You’ve done your analysis and you’ve designed a job aid. Now comes the time to get feedback on the initial draft and build in improvements. This constitutes the validation and troubleshooting phases, also called formative evaluation.

Formative Evaluation

Formative evaluation is the process of identifying ways to improve the design and checking feedback on the job aid. It is critical to do a formative evaluation with any job aid you design. No matter how confident you are with the initial design, a job aid prototype always benefits from validation and troubleshooting. This is because the test of a job aid’s quality is not based on your comfort level with the design, but on the users’ reactions and how well the job ...