Re: User interface elements as a section itself in manuals

[Sella Rush <sellar -at- APPTECHSYS -dot- COM>]

As others have suggested, this is a great time to introduce those clients to
the joys of context-sensitive help (or What's This help).  It's really a
compelling argument that the point people need help with a dialog box is
when they're sitting in front of it, and What's This help gives them what
they need far faster (two mouse clicks) than flipping through a printed
manual would.

There are some problems with context sensitive help depending on the
development platform, but plenty of creative ways to go.  I recently had to
develop cs help for an Oracle app, which turned out to be surprisingly
difficult. In the end, I was unable to do what's this help or any kind of
field-level help at all.  What I ended up with was a help topic for each
screen (window, form, whatever) with a list of field names linked to popup
topics.  In this way, users still had to click only twice to access an
explanation for a field.

If you're still bound by print manuals (no pun intended, but I'll let it
stand), do what I do and make sure that every element on every dialog box is
mentioned somewhere in the manual, and that the index contains a reference
to the explanation, using the exact same terminology as in the dialog box.
For example, if the label on a field says "word link count", the user should
be able to go to the index and look up that phrase to find the explanation.

I should say, however, that our interface is not very complicated (not
hundreds of dialog box items), and we've worked to logically group things
into dialog boxes.  As a result, once someone has looked up one item in the
index, odds are that items in the same dialog box are explained in the same
section.

Sella Rush
mailto:sellar -at- apptechsys -dot- com
Applied Technical Systems (ATS)
Bremerton, Washington
Developers of the CCM Database

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