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Re: Writing tasks for online help. Specific vs. General
Subject:Re: Writing tasks for online help. Specific vs. General From:bmpage <bmpage -at- mediaone -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 06 Aug 2001 15:40:18 -0500
"D.R. Smith" wrote:
> Is it better to write a general category with information included (less
> topics in the project) or better to have many topics with short, specific
> information.
>
> For example, if I am writing help for teacher software, do I want a category
> titled "Editing student information" that includes changing address, phone
> number, family info, etc. Or do I want many topics that are specific? For
> example, "Change students address," and "Change student's phone number" as
> topics. 15- 20 short topics versus one or two longer ones.
You may want to ask yourself a couple questions about the project to see what
you should do with it......
How likely is it that someone performing one of the tasks will be also need to
do another for the same caller? If tasks will normally be performed in
multiples, it may be easier for the user to tie them all into big topics.
How different are the steps in each procedure? If they are all fairly similar,
chunking them in large blocks makes sense, but not if they differ.
Is there any task which will need to be viewed more often than others? Or are
there tasks that most will already know how to perform? If you have a task that
is particularly involved and people always need to verify it, or if there are a
lot of tasks that people won't have many issues with, it's easier to do them all
as separate.
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