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Subject:Re: In reference to number of steps From:Dan Brinegar <vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sat, 21 Oct 2000 00:27:56 -0700
Fri, 20 Oct 2000 04:47:12 -0700 (PDT) Tom Murrell <trmurrell -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>First, I too would be daunted by a 50 step procedure. As a writer, I
>would try to find a way for the user to accomplish the needed task as
>easily as possible given the design of the task involved. But I don't
>think documentation can 'save' a bad design.
At one point early on in my first big project, I was confronted with
formatting a 53-step procedure that made no sense to me... I couldn't break
it up into smaller subsets of steps, nor could I find anything else in the
bookset that told me this procedure would actually work.
After a few smokes and a couple of rants in the atrium with some customers
going thru training on the product, I realized that the "53-step procedure"
had actually just been thrown verbatim into the book off some notes handed
from an engineer to a techwriter...
It was really "53 different things to try when ya don't really know what's
wrong with the system."
YMMV,
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Brinegar Information Developer/Research Droid on opiates this morning
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