Re: A reminder: visual and other indexes

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Here's a step in the right direction: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb328626.aspx 

Robert, I don't think Geoff is arguing for more screenshots of menus. I guess he's talking about this sort of thing: 
- an icon or control that can't be identified until you hover over it and which may not have an obvious menu equivalent 
- an option that's buried several clicks deep in a series of menus, dialog boxes and tabs 
- a feature that you accidentally hide or move, and there's no obvious way to "put it back the way it was" 

Some examples would be: 
- the middle-click scroll feature in Firefox, Word, etc. 
- the Hide White Space feature in Word (click between pages in Print Layout View) 
- dragging or hiding views in Eclipse (very easy to do by accident) 
- the Resize control in the Word vertical scroll bar (which only has a tooltip once it's already been used!) 
- the Ctrl Alt Hyphen feature in Word, which I regularly switch on by mistake when trying to insert an em dash 

Some things that would help users to learn about and deal with these features: 
- A visual index of controls and pointer icons, as Geoff suggests 
- A heavily annotated master screen shot giving labels to unnamed controls 
- A way to look up keyboard shortcuts (you use the right shortcut in the wrong application--the screen flickers and you think, oh dear, what did I just do...?) 

Stuart 

"I thought logorrhoea was an affliction of lumberjacks, 
till I discovered http://www.techwr-l.com/archives/"; 


Robert Lauriston wrote: 
> Yeah, it's very annoying when docs don't tell you how to navigate to 
> the command / dialog being discussed, but screenshots of menus just 
> clutter up the doc and waste the writer's time. 
> 
> My negative attitude about that sort of thing was probably exacerbated 
> by having inherited so many docs that contained nothing but a useless 
> narrative of the UI. 
> 
>> The second is that most documentation provides no way to 
>> look up things you can see on the screen. I've occasionally had 
>> problems with Adobe documentation, for example, because 
>> they'll write something like "to fram statically, use the 
>> framistat tool" without showing me what that tool looks like 
>> or where it's hidden. 
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