Re: Presentation of detailed images in a User's Guide?

[Beth Agnew <Beth -dot- Agnew -at- senecac -dot- on -dot- ca>]

What may be most effective is something other than the traditional user 
guide.  By that I mean, would an alphabetical reference of field names 
be more useful, or a discussion of the principles involved in each 
interface so the user could easily figure out for themselves what is 
needed on each screen?.

Not meaning to sound facetious, but do you really need to define all 
those fields and objects?  I realize this may sound like heresy, but 
perhaps the level of knowledge of your user base is such that you don't 
need to show every screen and every report. People who understand how 
reports are generated, and that they can customize the content of the 
report based on various criteria, do not need to be told that the Report 
Title field is where they should enter the title of the report.

If you need to explain certain fields, such as "Effective Date is the 
date when the policy is accepted by the carrier, not the date on which 
it is written", then a means of looking up "effective date" would be 
more useful than having to remember which screen, and consequently which 
page of the documentation, that field appears on.

Ideally, the product should have built-in help so that when the user is 
in the Effective Date field, for example, a right click would pop up a 
contextualized explanation of that field, i.e. effective date on policy 
screen vs. effective date on benefits screen. But I realize that that is 
a design issue you may not have much control over.

My suggestion is to be somewhat radical and really consider whether your 
users need to have every interface screen reproduced in the manual/help 
when they will see the screen in front of them.(Then the trick is to 
sell that innovation to the powers that be. :-)
--Beth

Cummings, Elizabeth wrote: