RE: Screenshot advice?

Subject: RE: Screenshot advice?
From: Rosemary J Horner <rhorner -at- quellos -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 12:40:35 -0700


Geoff Hart asked:

Can we assume that the help is context sensitive, so that pressing F1 brings
up the appropriate text for the current dialog? That's an important part of
the solution.

My answer:

Yes, it's context senstive. That's why I didn't consider screenshots to be
necessary in the beginning. There aren't really dialogs, as such. It's
web-based, and each web page is tied to one Help page.

Geoff Hart:

If the file is effective as online help, it's almost certainly not going to
be of any use as a training manual. Why? Because online help is presented as
a series of unrelated topics tied to dialog boxes and menu items and
provides no structured approach to learning to use the software. You can
fake such an approach by adding a series of help topics entitled "tutorial
[name of topic of the tutorial]", with each tutorial presented as follows:
the tutorial explains what steps to perform, in order, to accomplish a
particular task, and each step is also a hyperlink to the part of the help
file that explains how to accomplish that specific step. But that's a kludgy
way to do it.

Me:

I understand your point. But it's relatively simple software--a tool for
reporting and approving expenses. There's already a Help section called
"Life Cycle of an Expense" that describes the order things have to happen
in, and this actually matches fairly well with the UI of the tool--there's a
tab for each of the 5 stages. My approach to the Help is to describe each
tab in detail on one page, with sub-sections or sub-pages for popups where
appropriate. Because of the linear-ness (?) of the product, I don't expect
people to refer to the Help again after they've used the app a few times. So
it is geared mostly toward new users and learning how to use it.

Unfortunately, I can't do links. Yet. I've requested the enhancement, but
for now my Help tool is very limited.

The Project Manager was going to send out a tutorial by email, then decided
to point people to the help since it was already written. Lots of people
don't look at the help, in part because historically it hasn't been very
complete or useful. Hopefully that will change, now that they have a
full-time tech writer (me) :-)


Geoff Hart:

Screenshots may be the wrong solution to the problem. If you're trying to
provide explanations of the individual fields, something like "tooltips" or
"what's this" help might work more effectively. The advantage of this
approach is that the user never needs to open the help file at all: they
simply hold the cursor over each field or interface widget and wait for an
explanation to appear; this lets them see the screen (the context) plus the
explanation (a popup tooltip or whatever) simultaneously, which is close to
an ideal solution.

Me:

We do have that, to a certain extent. But the explanations offered there are
very basic. In the Help I try to give more context to the fields, including
examples.

Geoff Hart:

It's not clear what specific problem you're trying to solve with the
screenshots, so I can't provide more detailed suggestions. For example, if
the screenshots are intended to show users where to find a particular field,
then you can't really crop the shot too much; you can, however, make the
secondary text illegible since it's the main text (field names) that users
are looking for. Conversely, if the shots are intended as examples that show
what a completed screen looks like, they may not be necessary at all. Please
provide more details--for example, what problems are users reporting that
you think screenshots will solve?

Me:

Many of the problems are related to the fact that this is an "upgrade" to an
old tool, but includes new functionality and an entirely new UI. People are
confused about where to find things they're used to, why certain information
is showing or missing, new category options on dropdowns, defaults on
filters that weren't there before, that kind of thing.


Thanks for all the ideas and discussion. I'm new to this as a career,
although I've always been the kind of person to explain things to others. I
really appreciate the thought-provoking questions :-)

Rosemary





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