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Journals by EmailIn a group discussion earlier this week with some others in the Intermountain STC chapter, we talked about task-oriented vs. feature-oriented documentation. One of the people there mentioned that he rewrote one help system to get it that way. “Developers do it all the time,” he said, meaning redoing something after they realize they didn’t do it right the first time.
I’ve seen that myself. One project for which I maintain documentation was originally built using Vignette, a content management system. However, it was discovered later that to accommodate localization, they would have to rewrite the system as a Java app. (I don’t know the details, but the concept of why a CMS can’t handle localization is beyond me.)
I found myself wanting to do that to one of my help systems specifically.
Have you ever wanted to redo a documentation set? (I thought about redoing the help from scratch in that Vignette-to-Java project, but I was asked specifically not do that.)
I’m asking myself that now for a context-sensitive help project that has some how-to material in it. I did it the way I did because in a previous project, I did a context-sensitive help system and then a separate manual. That’s what my supervisor on the project wanted, and being relatively new in the field, I wasn’t going to second-guess that. The manual is task-based, and the customer has ended up using it as a basis for training.
This newer context-sensitive help system has a section for introductory material and another for the task-based stuff. Some of the screen help has task-based information, but overall, the feature-specific help far outweighs the task-based help.
I’d really like to redo the system to make it more like a third one that I’ve done where each context-sensitive screen has a section near the top called “How Do I …?” and then links to task-based help. I’ve read recently that people would rather click than scroll, so I’m not worried about that aspect.
The only tricky thing with using that same pattern is that this particular project has to be translated into multiple languages, and I don’t know if the “how do I” and task titles would translate gracefully. So I’d probably have to reword things. I just don’t want to call them “Related Topics” because they’re more than that. I suppose “Related Tasks” is all right, and it’s something I considered for that third project.
Anyway, there are further updates planned for the project where I want to reorganize the help, so I may be able to convince the program manager to budget in some time for me to do that in one of those future projects. I think the documentation and the users would benefit.
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