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I personally never mention it. I think the sequence of clicking a button to
access a dialog box is well understood by users (as is using the mouse and
keyboard)*. I tend to give step one as clicking the button. In step two, I
say, "In the Whosit dialog box, (or in the Whatsit tab of the Whosit dialog
box), ...." The important part of the steps is what they're supposed to do
in the box, not how to access the box and what makes the box appear on their
screen.
I must say in all my years of teaching computer skills to adult students,
I've never had a student ask where the dialog box comes from. They were
much more focused on learning how to accomplish their tasks than how the
software worked "under the hood" so to speak.
* If you think this is not clearly understood by your users, then perhaps a
section documenting how to use the GUI is in order. There you can explain
very clearly the sequence of clicking an interface button to view the
relevant dialog box. You can also describe how you document this sequence.
This way, you can write about the important stuff, (in other words, the
reason they're in that dialog box in the first place) without having to
worry about users understand the GUI terms.
Shalom from Jerusalem,
Sharon
Sharon Deitch
Technical Writer
SintecMedia
sharon -at- sintecmedia -dot- com
"Religion without humanity is poor human stuff." - Sojourner Truth,
abolitionist (1797-1883)
>
> Sorry to say I still have a lot of trouble with this one.
> Consider these alternatives:
> 1. Click the "New" button. The New Customer window appears,
> open to the
> Address tab.
> 2. Click the "New" button. The New Customer window will
> appear, open to the
> Address tab.
> I'm inclined to add the word "will", (making this the future
> conditional
> tense) since it adds the implication "If you click the "New"
> button, the New
> Customer window will appear." If you just say it appears,
> that seems to me
> to sever the causality between the apparition and the act of
> clicking the
> "New" button. The causality is further weakened if the second
> sentence is
> placed on a separate line or in a step of its own, as it so often is.
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