RE: Business Process Information in a User Guide

[Tara English-Sweeney <tesweeney -at- novadigm -dot- com>]

Hi Damien. Your posting reminded me of a situation where some people I know
were trying to include help into their product. However, they were simply
taking their current user's guides and just changing the presentation format
from a book to help - without making any other changes at all. In other
words - you just had scrolling pages of text that read like a book. If you
jumped to a topic out of order, you were lost! Not good.

I think that people have very different expectations from different types of
doc. For example, like you said, if someone goes to help it's usually
because they are stuck or want to know HOW to do something.

In our case, our product is highly customizable - which also makes it
extremely complex. This means that our users have to have a thorough
understanding of the product and how it works, as well as know how to
complete tasks. Although the procedural portion is necessary, it almost
becomes a secondary item at times - at least in our printed publications. 
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Damien wrote:
This is a part of an ongoing debate about just how much information we
provide.  Are the users interested in the why and whatfor or are they only
interested in the how.  It very much depends on exactly what it is you're
documenting - know your audience again.  When I've done online help, I've
tended to make it procedure based - the how to approach, working on the
principle (and customer feedback) that when the user resorts to help it's
because they're stuck and want to know how to do something.  We have also
included links to background topics (the why etc) for anyone who is looking
for that.

In other projects we've used a flowchart approach with each block in the
chart representing a stage in the process. Each procedure has the relevant
step in the flowchart highlighted and a reference to where in the manual
background information can be found.

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