RE: What's your preference: One long page or several small pages?

["Wright, Lynne" <Lynne -dot- Wright -at- Kronos -dot- com>]

And thanks for the clarification!

Iâm going to side with Robert Lauriston on this oneâ unless thereâs a logical way to break the procedure up into a series of shorter procedures, you might as well keep it all as one procedure on the same Confluence page. Seems like there isnât any effect on useability whether the user has to keep scrolling down, or keep clicking links to get to the next part. And like you pointed out, one page is better in terms of bookmarking and outputting to pdf.

From: John G <john -at- garisons -dot- com>
Sent: Thursday, August 2, 2018 3:18 PM
To: Wright, Lynne <Lynne -dot- Wright -at- Kronos -dot- com>
Cc: TechWhirl (techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com) <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject: Re: What's your preference: One long page or several small pages?

Hi Lynne,

Thanks for asking me to clarify.

  *   I'm talking about browser-based content (ours is created in Confluence, but any web presentation will apply).
  *   A "screenload" is
when I have to scroll down (or Page Down) to see what won't fit in the first screen of content.

  *   Page = topic
, so yes, one long topic vs. several small topics.

JG


  *
  *

On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 3:08 PM Wright, Lynne <Lynne -dot- Wright -at- kronos -dot- com<mailto:Lynne -dot- Wright -at- kronos -dot- com>> wrote:
I'm confused about what you mean by a long vs short page, and also what you mean by "screenload":

If you're working in Word or Frame or other similar doc authoring tool, are you talking about changing the page size to 8 1/2 x 14 or something?

Or are you talking about topics in a help system, and you're wondering whether to put the whole procedure in one topic, or break it into smaller sub-topics?

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Subject: What's your preference: One long page or several small pages?

Quick survey!

I have several long-ish pages (5 or 6 screenloads) each of which contains rather complex instructions to run a procedure.

Is that better than spreading the same information across 5 or 6 short pages -- assuming there's an intro/overview and links from each short page to the previous and next pages?

My arguments for long pages:

   - One long page is easy to bookmark
   - PDFing is easy and fast an includes everything
   - Easy to look back and ahead

My arguments for short pages:

   - Less intimidating
   - Easier to scan and read

Your thoughts? And bonus points if you can cite user preferences and reasons!

Thanks in advance,

John Garison | Lead Technical Communicator | Medidata Solutions
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