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John wrote:
> "Don't fix something if it's not broke."
John, our respective biases are showing. Neither of us has seen the
online help Nancy is talking about, but you seem inclined to give the
doc the benefit of the doubt--i.e., without concrete user complaints
or other objective evidence, you lean toward leaving the documentation
as is. I, on the other hand, have a habit of rewriting anything that
moves (which may or may not be a Good Thing depending on your
perspective), and if Nancy says the online help could be improved, I'm
all for it. Her comments sound reasonable to me.
> We've all received/been given documentation that was
> VERY attractive. Good use of white space, chunking, great visual
> stuff. That is, until you started reading it. It was out of date,
> poorly written, factually inaccurate. Was it a good document?
> OTOH, we've seen read.me files written in courier, no formatting.
> The content made you weep with pleasure.
Ugh, the beautiful-but-dumb/plain-but-smart dichotomy again. It
doesn't have to be either/or. My goal is documentation that is
visually appealing, easy to read and understand, AND accurate and
complete.
Whenever someone proposes making docs look better, a couple of people
always seem suspicious that the visual improvements are purely
cosmetic fluff that are being done instead of, or to the detriment of,
solid content. But wait a minute: the only visual things Nancy alluded
to were lackluster colors and the absence of screenshots, yet we're
turning this into another pretty doc vs. smart doc argument. Most of
her stated objections to the online help are conceptual, so this isn't
about fiddling with fonts.
As for doing the job "right"... right is what's best for the users,
not what's most expedient for the writers. I've walked away from job
opportunities where it was clear the writers were too overworked to do
the job right (yes, it was a happier job market then).
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