The main stakeholder for one of my projects has asked for a procedural user guide for certain tasks in the application performed by particular user roles. It will be comparable to a manual I did for another application for the same stakeholder; that one was organized first by role and then by task. The business process was heavily intertwined with some of the software procedures in that manual. This next one may be the same way, though it won’t be as substantial a project because not nearly as many tasks will be included.

In that previous manual, I had a side column for note boxes, but the rest of the information was contained in the main column. Many different kinds of information were mixed in that main flow of content, with only some being set off by some style or another. I think that’s a bit problematic. Users wouldn’t be able to tell readily which type of information they happened to be looking at all the time.

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