Re: embedded help

["Simon North" <sintac -at- home -dot- nl>]

Miriam, 

The company I work for creates software packages that are used to create end-
user applications. Due to a change in business philosophy, we want to enable end-
users to create their own applications (or at least proof of concept). So, in place of 
traditional documentation and online help (which I have spent the last year 
converting to single source), I (a one-man team) am now introducing embedded 
help. However, it's been impossible to limit it to just online help, and I have had to 
move into the area of full-scale user assistance. In return for the additional effort, I 
am planning on dropping manuals all together, and the changed scope has allowed 
me to radically reduce the scale and scope of the traditional online help, cutting it 
back to strict procedural task descriptions (a bit like in Microsoft Word).   

There are a lot of procedural steps that I cannot address in the embedded help or 
the user assistance because of the limited scope, and so I am augmenting the 
online help with "show me" filmlets done in Macromedia Captivate (what used to be 
RoboDemo). 

I have to admit that I haven't yet rolled out to users, it's too early a stage yet; at the 
moment I am still selling the concept to management and R&D, but it's proving 
pretty successful so far and for our kind of product I cannot easily think of a better 
way of approaching this.   

I'm not sure how relevant this would be to you since I have full control over the 
GUI; one of our tools is for developing GUIs and we want end-users to be able to 
create their own GUis too. This gives me much more control than you would 
expect from, say, a Windows application. I would, however, ... for what it's worth be 
delighted to compare notes and share some of the things I have learned.  

Simon North. 

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