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RE: Hypertext links -- how best to make these useful
Subject:RE: Hypertext links -- how best to make these useful From:"Porrello, Leonard" <lporrello -at- illumina -dot- com> To:Fiona Hanington <fiona -dot- hanington -at- ericsson -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:53:23 +0000
You might consider putting one of your descriptive phrases in the tootip for the link. It's not the most elegant solution (as some people may find the tooltips annoying). And there is also the problem of moble/touchscreen use (in which the GUI has no sense of a pointing device (a finger or stylus) hovering over a link). However, if you aren't and do not plan to write for mobile devices....
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+lporrello=illumina -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+lporrello=illumina -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Fiona Hanington
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 1:12 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Hypertext links -- how best to make these useful
Can anyone point me to some good guidelines on how to structure and phrase hypertext links so that the user has no doubts about clicking? Ie, so that users can guess, from the way the link is phrased/structured/presented/formatted, just what type of info they'll get at the other end of it?
I seem to recall that Visio's online help was pretty good in this regard.
Conceptual links were "tell me about..."
Task info was "how do i..."
Examples were "show me..."
I've been searching the web for some good resources or guidelines on this, but so far haven't found anything too useful. One problem is that the term "link" is too prevalent out there on the internet...
Thanks! Please include me directly in your reply as I am on digest.
Fiona
fiona dot hanington at ericsson dot com
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Fiona Hanington
Customer Product Information, IP Neworks Ericsson
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See the “Getting Started with Doc-To-Help” blog post. http://bit.ly/doc-to-help-3-steps
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