Recently I took some material from the latest release notes and added them to the help system. It was the kind of information that was timeless, rather than topics that explain what to do (or what not to do) until the next release and so on.

As I categorized this information and added it to the table of contents, I realized that what made sense in the topic titles in the context of a TOC or list (or a sheet of release notes) didn’t necessarily make sense on its own. For the sake of brevity, I had omitted some words that were actually essential if the title was all the user had to go on in order to decide whether to explore that topic.

As a hypothetical example, part of the TOC could have looked something like this:

Credit Cards
>> Applying for a Card
>> Making Monthly Payments
>> Viewing Your Current Balance

If this were to appear in a larger set of documents (rather than something that’s exclusively about credit cards), it wouldn’t be clear just from the titles of the topics what kind of card or even what kind of payments and balance are being talked about. The user would have to drill into those topics if coming in from some non-contextual way to see if it’s relevant to his objectives rather than determining it just from the title.

So of course, I had to go back and change some topic titles. These days when we present information chunked in small topics, the titles should be self-contained and give enough information to help the audience see in a second whether it’s relevant.

Related entries (auto-generated):

Results of a Team Design Review: A Different Context-Sensitive Help Structure

Anticipatory Search in Context-Sensitive Help

A Shift in My Context-Sensitive Help Approach

Technical Documentation for Zero-Attention Audiences

Elements in Today’s Release Notes