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 too much as technical writers, and it’s not that helpful to users. Here are a few examples to demonstrate this. I read an intriguing article today called 5 High Paying, Low Stress Jobs on Yahoo … more »

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 starts. What does it mean for a system of organization to be “logical”? And how does the user navigate this logic we create? Our system of organization partly determines the findability of the content. Without … more »

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 subject matter experts and extracted critical information from them for many months. You have explored Swordfish inside and out, documenting every possible task and setting, and now you have a ton of content. The help … more »

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 can be super agents and regular agents. The super agents can configure the permissions of the regular agents with 20 different permission settings. This means the relevant help topics for any agent can vary … more »

Everyone knows it’s a good practice to chunk your help material into discrete topics, but how granular should you chunk it? Take a look at this Microsoft Word 2007 help topic on inserting headers and footers. Although inserting headers and footers is the main task, the topic really has 11 related tasks: Insert the same header or footer on each page Make the first page … more »

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