Technical Reviews of On-line Help

Subject: Technical Reviews of On-line Help
From: "Cathy Arthur" <carthur -at- ndigital -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 09:26:41 -0400

Hi All,

We are embarking on our first on-line help project. We will be using
Forehelp Premier 2000 to generate HTML-based help, with context sensitive
stuff hooked into the program (a Windows based application) by the
programmers. There is a large project to be done, and I am fairly certain I
can persuade management to tackle a very small project first to learn from.
Paper documentation will be develped simultaneously for the small project,
but the large project will not have paper documentation for the program. The
hardware is extensively documented.

My question is this: what is the best way to organize technical reviews?

I have only thought of three options, none of which seem very, umm,
efficient:

One, the on-line help is developed and supplied to the technical reviewers
to view in their web browsers. This addresses the technical accuracy of each
topic, but will not address how appropriately or thoroughly the help is
integrated with the program. Do I ask the reviewers to write out comments on
paper with a reference to the topic title?

Second, we wait until the help is integrated with the program and hand the
entire thing over for review. Parts of the program have already gone
through some form of QA and been released for beta testing. This will spot
problems with implementation as well as topic accuracy, but will corrections
be more difficult? Again, do I ask the reviewers to write comments on paper?

Lastly, do I print out the help topics, hand them over to the reviewers
(with the electronic version) and let them mark up the paper version?

How else could we handle this? We are at the point of being close to
finishing our assessment of ForeHelp/other tools and beginning to work on
the project after we have purchased Forehelp. We also need to import some
stuff done with Dreamweaver and WinHelp (by the engineers) into ForeHelp. I
don't anticipate reviews being necessary for a few weeks (for the small
project) but I would like to have a better method of handling reviews before
we get to that step in the process. I expect 2 or 3 reviewers. The company
has not had a technical writer before me (they relied on co-ops) so it is a
good opportunity to set up a robust review process.

Thanks!

Cathy Arthur
Technical Writer
Northern Digital Inc.





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