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Rosemary Horner reports: <<I'm writing online help for an application that
will be used only within our organization... (no printed user manual or
anything). It's accessible from anywhere within the app by a link or
pressing F1, and will be displayed in a fixed-width browser window. The
width of the content frame in the Help is probably about 2/3 of the fixed
width of the application window.>>
Can we assume that the help is context sensitive, so that pressing F1 brings
up the appropriate text for the current dialog? That's an important part of
the solution.
<<What I'm not sure about is how best/whether to use screenshots. My first
thought was not to bother, because the help is going to be mostly accessed
from within the application. But now it's released and people are confused,
and the Project Manager wants to send a link directly to the Help to the
entire company, in lieu of training. So now we want screenshots because it
needs to stand alone too.>>
If the file is effective as online help, it's almost certainly not going to
be of any use as a training manual. Why? Because online help is presented as
a series of unrelated topics tied to dialog boxes and menu items and
provides no structured approach to learning to use the software. You can
fake such an approach by adding a series of help topics entitled "tutorial
[name of topic of the tutorial]", with each tutorial presented as follows:
the tutorial explains what steps to perform, in order, to accomplish a
particular task, and each step is also a hyperlink to the part of the help
file that explains how to accomplish that specific step. But that's a kludgy
way to do it.
<<Most screens are a list of items (they collapse to one summary line, or
expand to show a lot more detail) that are almost full-screen width;
therefore, they're wider than the Help window. I don't want to cause
horizontal scrolling. Should I take screenshots of the entire width of an
item listing and shrink them to fit, making the text almost illegible but
giving a general idea of the layout? Or should I take screenshots of
sections that are less than full width but can be used full-size?>>
Screenshots may be the wrong solution to the problem. If you're trying to
provide explanations of the individual fields, something like "tooltips" or
"what's this" help might work more effectively. The advantage of this
approach is that the user never needs to open the help file at all: they
simply hold the cursor over each field or interface widget and wait for an
explanation to appear; this lets them see the screen (the context) plus the
explanation (a popup tooltip or whatever) simultaneously, which is close to
an ideal solution.
It's not clear what specific problem you're trying to solve with the
screenshots, so I can't provide more detailed suggestions. For example, if
the screenshots are intended to show users where to find a particular field,
then you can't really crop the shot too much; you can, however, make the
secondary text illegible since it's the main text (field names) that users
are looking for. Conversely, if the shots are intended as examples that show
what a completed screen looks like, they may not be necessary at all. Please
provide more details--for example, what problems are users reporting that
you think screenshots will solve?
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Writing, in a way, is listening to the others' language and reading with
the others' eyes."--Trinh T. Minh-Ha, "Woman native other"
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