In this ongoing series on organizing content, we’ve shifted from organizing help outside the interface to organizing help inside the interface. Moving help inside the interface has many advantages, and there are plenty of best practices for style and format. But the biggest shift in perspective, which I argued in my last post, is to stop differentiating between the interface and the help content. The … more »

I don’t know if it was my long bike ride along a river or my immersion in the writing phase of a documentation project, but this week I’ve been pondering Mike Hughes’ assertion that help should be a “mile wide and thirty seconds deep.” I first heard Mike mention this help landscape metaphor in a podcast several months back. Mike also wrote an article called … more »

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: 1. Make your help a mile wide and thirty seconds … more »