Sometimes I get ideas about a problem I’m trying to solve once I’ve stopped actively thinking about it and have let it drift into the back of my mind. With Project Pinnacle, something escaped my attention until a few weeks after my visit to the pilot site.

Well, it didn’t entirely escape my notice, but its implications for documentation and training didn’t hit me immediately.

The thing I noticed while watching users try out my quick reference guides was that they tended to follow only the first few steps of the procedure. They would look at it long enough to get to the screen where they performed the task, and then they would try to do the rest without the guides.

One of the reasons for this is that they had to keep glancing between the monitor and the paper, which made it easy to lose their place. Trying to use a finger didn’t help much either because at some point they had to start typing.

A few weeks after my visit, I got an idea of maybe a true quick reference guide that would fit what they needed. Since they relied on the printed procedures only for navigation, why not just provide the navigation steps?

I put together a version of each guide that listed the steps with double angle brackets between each step. This condensed the existing material from about four pages for each guide down to under one page. I haven’t tried these versions out yet. The project manager wasn’t in favor of the version of the guides that have the screenshots with callouts because of the cost of keeping the screenshots current for all languages.

When I first reported to the project leadership about my visit to the pilot site, I pointed out that a way to improve our training of our audience and at the same time reduce documentation costs would be to provide more prompts in the application. I’m not trying to reduce my workload, but I believe that the more help you provide in the interface, the less help you have to maintain elsewhere. I know, not real profound, but it’s not something very many product designers think about.

Since then, I’ve provided prompts and descriptions for a number of application screens and features. We’ve seen a direct impact of this as we’ve worked on the training video scripts. We want to keep the verbal explanations simple and let the features be demonstrated so that we don’t have to rerecord the audio if features change. The fact that we’re including help in the interface helps us do this because we can leave much of the explanation to the application itself.

Image credit: Salvatore Vuono, freedigitalphotos.net

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Last week I visited the pilot location for Project Pinnacle. My focus was to see how well my first-draft quick reference guides worked, but I spent some time training.

The office staff tended to want to ask me how to do things and be walked through it, but I took those times to ask them to test out the instructions for me. However, on one occasion, I had to guide a brand-new user through a somewhat complicated scheduling procedure while she was on the phone with the person setting up the appointment. I figured it would be better to help her through that one because she’d feel enough pressure from trying to do it right and in a timely manner.

In addition to notes on improvements to make to the guides, I kept other notes. The rundown:

• 5 tasks to add to the guides
• 14 other changes needed to the guides
• 20 feature or change requests
• 10 bugs
• 14 miscellaneous items that were questions, observations, or usability problems

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I’ve been reading Ginny Redish’s book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works. It was a bit slow at first because the early material is pretty basic. And I came into it with the preconception that it wouldn’t apply much to documentation, since we write help systems and manuals.

In light of our team’s search for the tool that best meets a set of specific requirements, I’ve decided that Redish’s book has everything to do with what I do—or what I should be doing.

My Beef with Tri-pane Help

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, it’s no secret to you that I’m not a big fan of tri-pane help. I think it’s dated and is associated in people’s minds with unhelpfulness.

But in our search for a tool that will give us a more robust Web output, I’ve discovered the main reason I don’t like tri-pane help.

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In my initial conversation with the manager of Project Pinnacle, we decided on a set of role-based quick reference guides as the documentation for the application.

I ended up with about five weeks to complete these guides in the midst of other projects. After a demo of the application given by the lead tester, I sent the manager an outline of each guide. He didn’t get back to me right away, so I started writing the guides while using a test version of the application.

The guides’ structure was pretty simple. On the first page, I included a screenshot with callouts that explain the navigation structure of the application: header, subheader, tabs, links, buttons, and so on. The hope is that this would reduce the amount of instructions needed by covering the basics together. After basic navigation, I covered the main tasks for the role in question.

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As part of the January event of STC’s Intermountain Chapter on visual communication, I demonstrated my favorite things about Adobe Illustrator. The idea was that you don’t have to be a graphic designer to use Illustrator for some decent graphics. Since the attendees were stuck watching me, I’m posting these items for them to go back and refer to.

Here are the main things I talked about. (Warning: I may not be using standard Illustrator terms here.)

I use Illustrator CS4 at work, so my demo and this post also use that version.

Gradients and Gradient Tool

Gradients give a nice three-dimensional look to graphics without a lot of effort. To get a gradient:

1. Draw an object.
2. With the object selected, click the gradient fill in the toolbar.

   

3. Change the colors in the gradient using Gradient palette. Click and drag colors from the Swatches palette into the handles in the Gradient palette.

   

4. Add handles by clicking just underneath the gradient slider in the Gradient palette.
5. Change the way the handles affect the gradient by clicking a handle (bottom) or a location point (top) and dragging it horizontally.

   

6. Remove a handle by clicking it and dragging downward.
7. Toggle between a linear gradient and radial gradient using the dropdown box in the Gradient palette.
8. Change the direction or severity of the gradient by selecting the Gradient Tool in the toolbar  and then either clicking and dragging on or around the object or manipulating the bar that appears on the object. 

   

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