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Subject:RE: The Burden of Screen Captures From:Mike West <Mike -dot- West -at- oz -dot- quest -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 25 Nov 2002 12:45:27 +1100
Mike O wrote:
> While developing Win95, MS also did some research on the
> usefulness of user documentation, and they came up with some
> guidelines on how to write procedures. Mostly it was just a
> common-sense restatement of principles other tech writers were
> already practicing. MS didn't invent task-oriented docs, but
> they did inject it into the mainstream with the launch of Win95.
> And we were all doing it. If you wrote short procedures that
> popped up in WinHelp secondary windows, you were doing it too.
That is how I remember it, too.
A lot of the input to the task-based approach,
which Microsoft and others were putting
into practice well before the principles were
enshrined in the MMoS, came from behavioral
studies funded in the '70s and '80s by IBM,
Microsoft, Xerox PARC, and a few others.
I've read somewhere that IBM and Microsoft
felt compelled to take these documentation
usability issues seriously after the near-
disaster of the DOS user guide that came
with the first IBM PC. As you will recall, it
was a traditional language reference, organized
alphabetically by command, as programmers
and engineers would have been accustomed
to seeing.
To the secretaries and their bosses who had
been sold these brilliant labor-saving machines,
the manual was pure gibberish.
That it was written by people who knew
the operating system intimately, there can
be no doubt.
Did that make it "valuable and insightful"?
I don't think so, but some others -- here or not
here, depending on your point of view -- , might.
--
Mike W
Melbourne
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