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Subject:FWD: Help for installation wizards From:"Eric J. Ray" <ejray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 21 Jul 1998 13:57:21 -0600
Name withheld upon request. Please reply on list.
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We have a client who has lately been requesting help files for, of all
things, installation wizards. I asked a lot of questions, made a few
suggestions on the UI, checked with their customer service personnel,
provided reasons against it, and was eventually told that my job was to give
them what they wanted. If it were just a single help file in English, I
wouldn't be bothered as much. However, they're localizing this file in 20
languages. I've tried to educate them about the cost involved, the
task-based approach to Windows help, the typical practice of including such
information (with greater detail) in an installation guide or a readme file,
and of the problems with trying to compensate for UI problems with
documentation, but all to no avail.
What's more, instead of taking my suggestion that they limit the help topics
to troubleshooting and dialogs that branch, they wanted a topic describing
precisely what was on every dialog, including how to continue to the next
topic ("...uh, click Next to continue?"). They even required topics
explaining how to run the installation and uninstallation routines FROM THE
COMMAND LINE! And the user won't even be able to get to the help file unless
the installer is running.
So now we're being asked to do something very similar for another project
(same client), except this time, it's an installer that runs over an
intranet. It'll be WinHelp rather than HTML-based. :-|
These aren't complex applications, and I can do little more than duplicate
what is already on the dialogs since they're typically pretty verbose. Yet
the information I think would be helpful (detailed descriptions of the
components, installation options, and supported models of hardware), they
don't want because they plan to reuse these files for future products
(rather than simplify and improve their UI).
This seems insane to me. Am I deluded, or is it becoming more common to
overdocument like this?
