Subject: speaking of help...
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Mar 09 2001 - 15:45:32 CST
About a year ago, I was messing around with a potential organizational
system for our online help files.
My goal was to come up with a lightweight information design that would
allow us to ship a help system that was:
- implemented as a collection of HTML files, but
- still as organized and richly-indexed as proprietary help systems.
The idea was to cherry-pick some of the most useful features of good WinHelp
or Apple Guide setups in a totally XP way. Enabling people to get to the
information they need is the hardest design problem for help systems, and it
often helps to allow people a bunch of ways to get to the same information.
Historically, this is something that tends to get addressed in a totally
platform-centric fashion (if at all), but given all the innovations in web
site design, I wanted to see if the same problems could be solved using
old-fashioned brute-force HTML.
I didn't have much time, so it's littered with TODOs and wandering chunks of
prose. It obviously needs work, but I think it's in a state where the
overall effect should be fairly apparent. In particular, I did get to the
point where I was pretty happy with the overall template, and especially the
index sections.
is this relevant?
----------------
While I was off doing the twin thing, a bunch of talented folks have gotten
started on implementing our help system. There's already a lot of useful
content in there, and I don't want to interfere with their efforts.
However, I thought that my stuff might be helpful to anyone trying to figure
out how to scale up our help efforts to cover *all* the features we'll be
cramming into our 1.0 release. That's going to be a big job, and coming up
with an organized, scalable way to outline and fill in all the required work
might be really valuable.
In any event, this stuff is certainly more useful if I hand it off, rather
than leaving it to gather dust on my hard drive. So, here 'tis.
Enjoy!
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Mar 09 2001 - 15:38:01 CST