Tag Archives: context-sensitive help

Tip for Usability in Context-Sensitive Help

Theresa Putkey explains how to make context-sensitive help more usable. Don’t just present a single task to the user that relates to the page the user is on, but rather present a variety of topics spanning the how, when, why, and other related issues for the page.

10 Things I Learned from My Last Podcast

The last podcast I recorded, on “Make Your Help Indispensable, Safeguard Your Job,” with Mike Hughes, was so full of good information about how to make your help more valuable and user-friendly that I couldn’t help but write up notes on it. Here’s a list of the ten things I learned from my last podcast: Continue Reading »

Flare Context Sensitive Help – Focusing the Minimized Help Window Back on Top

Context-sensitive help in Madcap Flare is pretty easy to set up – you just follow the steps in Flare’s context-sensitive help instructions. However, there’s a usability problem that you must work around for the context-sensitive help to be successful. Let me explain. When the user clicks a context-sensitive help link, a help window appears, as it Continue Reading »

What’s Convenient Gets Used — a General Principle That Applies to Nearly Everything

Recently I switched from using the iRiver I bought two years ago to my wife’s iPod Nano, which she only uses intermittently. I don’t know why I used my iRiver for so long. The iPod is superior in every way, but mostly because it offers convenience. For example, New podcasts download automatically when I merely Continue Reading »

IT Author Podcast — Two Podcasts on Flare, One on the Making of a Technical Writer, and a Dogcast on User Psychology

I listened to Alistair Christie’s IT Author podcast the other day online and then later driving home from work. Alistair is based in Scotland and has one of the most enjoyable podcasts on technical communication around. If you listen to podcasts, add his podcast to your feed. His latest episodes are as follows: In Flare: Continue Reading »

May 24, 2013 » Jonatan Lundin: Hi Tom Thanks for an interesting post. First, I need to second Mark that people do not seek for topics... (Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content — Illustrated Edition
May 23, 2013 » Mark Baker: Tom, For an scholarly study on the quality of crowd documentation vs official documentation, see... (Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content — Illustrated Edition
May 23, 2013 » Nathan Posten: Hi Tom, I know this is an older post, but I still thought I would share our method for dealing the... (Does DITA Encourage Authors to Fragment Information into a Million Little Pieces?
May 23, 2013 » Scot Marvin: Tom, Another intriguing article. Thank you. I don’t know whether my desire to keep the TOC is based... (Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content — Illustrated Edition
May 23, 2013 » Ellis Pratt: In a way, you can use DITA to do that. It’s making the content semantic at sentence and paragraph... (Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content — Illustrated Edition
May 22, 2013 » Don Day: Tom, the editor that you were trying to access aat expedita.info is Oxygen’s Java-based Web component.... (Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content — Illustrated Edition
May 22, 2013 » John Tait: Great article – thank-you I’ve used DITA’s subject scheme maps to define a taxonomy and... (Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content — Illustrated Edition