Collaboration between software producers and academic usability researchers represent opportunities for combining theoretical understanding with applied research. Software producers earn supplemental resources to evaluate documentation, and academics earn valuable opportunities to apply, test, and expand theoretical ideas. This article highlights the collaboration between one software company and a team of academic researchers at a Texas university. It offers insight about establishing successful industry-academe partnerships and about usability testing of installation software artifacts. This case study presents findings on distributed usability and suggests that software producers create installation wizards and support documentation as a hierarchical system of information.
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