Use words or pictures?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Carol Rowles wondered: Our help system has a lot of buttons that can be 
used as short cuts to accomplish a task instead of going to File or 
Options or something of that sort and selecting the task from the 
drop-down. Do most of you put a picture of the button into the on-line 
and say, for example: "To drop a field onto the form, click (picture of 
the button).">>

That's my preference, since it communicates much more clearly than 
naming the button and hoping the user can remember the name, or 
describing the button and hoping the reader can parse your description.

<<Or, do you say, for example, "To drop a field onto the form, click 
the Drop button?">>

That's how I do it if all the buttons are text-only. Otherwise, for 
consistency, the graphic is better when there are mixed textual and 
graphical buttons.

<<Using the picture, if you reference the button several times in the 
paragraph, can get sloppy.  Would you use the picture once and after 
that just use the name of the button?  Suggestions??>>

I've done that too where the help engine (usually WinHelp) proved 
incapable of elegantly displaying the buttons in-line; that's less of a 
problem in print, but you can still get ugly line spacing if the 
buttons don't fit nicely within a line. This leads to horrible rivers 
of white space running through the text. Blech.

The solution is to set the button in the margin or towards the top of a 
topic, along with the button's name, then use only that name within the 
running text. This is a suitable compromise because it displays the 
button visually once per topic (to help readers spot it on the screen), 
then uses the word subsequently (to make the text more readable).

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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