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Re: What good is it if you can't find it?

Subject: Re: What good is it if you can't find it?
From: Fred Brown <fred -dot- brown -at- allegrotechindexing -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:53:28 -0500


Susan, what great examples!

"AutoShapes" is an interesting problem. You'd want to index it under "AutoShapes" for sure, but the frustrated user may not know or think of that term. You would likely want to also index it under "drawing canvas, turning off" plus any other terms that might come to the user's mind.

Research done at a university in the Netherlands showed that having lots of synonyms was the most important factor in the usability of an index. For your "symbol" example, you would make the link

(1) using a "See" cross-reference

characters, inserting 321-322
...
symbols. See characters

(2) or, by double posting

characters, inserting 321-322
...
symbols, inserting 321-322

Using a "See" cross-reference would instruct the user that the official term used in the documentation was now "character."

-- Fred Brown

At 11:22 AM 11/15/2002 -0800, you wrote:

In the content v. design wars, chalk up two points for
design.

Beth Kane needed to know how to turn off the drawing
canvas in Word. Well, I knew where the checkbox was
because I'd stumbled across it, and the What's this?
help works just fine. But there was no index entry
link to AutoShapes, where Beth was looking for it, so
the content might as well not have existed.

I just upgraded to Corel 11 and if you've ever used
Corel in the past, you know they supply a bunch of
symbol fonts that you can display on a tablet and
drag and drop into a drawing. I couldn't find that
feature anywhere in Corel 11. Turns out they changed
the name of the function from Insert Symbol to Insert
Character. A link to the help topic from a keyword
"symbol" would have made my life easy. I eventually
found out about the switch at the online knowledge
base.

...

My two cents on a *way* too serious Friday. ;-)
-Sue Gallagher


~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Allegro Technical Indexing
"business and technical publications"
fred -dot- brown -at- allegrotechindexing -dot- com
http://www.allegrotechindexing.com
voice: (613) 728-9373 fax: (613) 728-0644



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