Re: Index/TOC Needed in HTML &/or Browser-Based Help? (take II)

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

Some years ago I did a presentation at one of Joe Welinske's WinWriters 
conferences on "Ta Ta TOC" where I voiced my opinion (an it's only an 
opinion) that most TOCs weren't worth a bucket of warm spit. In the 
project I was working on at the time, we had over 1000 topics; if all 
the little books were opened up, it would be almost 15 feet (three 
meters) long, and when viewed through a six-inch (15 cm) window, it's 
virtually impossible to find anything. In fact, I had periodically been 
unable to find topics via the TOC that I knew were there despite having 
written them and having used the TOC for a year.

To bolster my opinion, I got confirmation from Jared Spool (principal of 
User Interface Engineering, www.uie.com) who stated that in 20 years of 
observing users in hands-on tests of online help systems, he had never 
seen a single person use the TOC.

That was enough for me. In my projects, instead of a TOC I put in a 
'Home page' that's more or less a portal page to the help. It gives 
users a jumping off point much like the home page of an information site 
does. I provide full text search. I also provide lots and lots of 
contextual links: links that, based on a page the user is looking at, 
refer to other pages that are probably also of interest. And in over 5 
years of providing such a help system to executive and professional 
users, I got several compliments and no complaints.

Anecdotal evidence? Yes. But it has worked for me.

My 2¢,

John Garison

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