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New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1]
Monday, May 17th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | No Comments »
I'm starting a new series on organizing content. I'm not sure how many parts there will be in this series. Writing essays in a serial format is an experiment I'm ... Read more..
Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2]
Monday, May 17th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 5 Comments »
Welcome to the new project you’ll be documenting: Project Swordfish. Project Swordfish is an application used by the FBI to train agents in virtual simulations of undercover operations.
With Swordfish, users ... Read more..
Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3]
Monday, May 17th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 25 Comments »
Let's fast forward a year. Assume you have explored Swordfish and have hammered out a lot of help topics -- nearly 200 help topics, in fact. You have met with ... Read more..
Imposing Order Versus Observing Order [Organizing Content 4]
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 10 Comments »
It’s easy to postpone organization. We begin writing discrete help topics, hundreds of them, and then try to group them together in a logical way. But here’s where the problem ... Read more..
Topic-Based, Hierarchical Navigation [Organizing Content 5]
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 32 Comments »
I mentioned that topic-based, hierarchical navigation, which is the standard for 95% of the help files I see, is becoming a tired, less-than-useful navigation system. We rely on this system ... Read more..
Faceted Classification, Faceted Search [Organizing Content 6]
Thursday, May 20th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 20 Comments »
In the last post, I argued that topic-based navigation systems generally fail for users. Topic-based navigation has some merits, such as allowing users to see topics in context, to discover ... Read more..
Implementing Faceted Classification/Search with a Help Authoring Tool [Organizing Content 7]
Friday, May 21st, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 23 Comments »
In my last post, I presented faceted classification and faceted search as an alternative method of organization for help content. While faceted navigation systems are common on the web, implementing ... Read more..
Second-Level Faceted Navigation [Organizing Content 8]
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 2 Comments »
In my previous post, I introduced faceted classification and faceted navigation as alternative methods for organizing help content. In contrast to topic-based hierarchies, faceted navigation provides multiple paths into the same content. These ... Read more..
Browse Versus Search: Stumbling into the Unknown Unknown [Organizing Content 9]
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 9 Comments »
So far I've been writing about alternative ways to navigate help content. The other day I was talking with my colleagues about some of these ideas, and one colleague said, You know, ... Read more..
Figuring Out Search Algorithms [Organizing Content 10]
Thursday, May 27th, 2010 Posted in Technical Writing | 2 Comments »
In my last post, I argued that navigation systems can't be entirely discarded in favor of search, because navigation helps users discover the unknown unknown. But now that we've covered ... Read more..