Index/TOC Needed in HTML &/or Browser-Based Help?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Barbara Vega reports: <<I have been told that in the Microsoft Vista 
version to come out, the TOC and Index have been eliminated, in favor 
of a much more efficient, improved search engine. Supposedly they have 
found that virtually no one uses the TOC or index any more, and this is 
much of their reasoning for eliminating it.>>

Did you hear this from a credible source? If true, it sounds like a 
brain-dead decision equivalent to the crippling of revision tracking in 
Word XP, but it's so radically out of touch with reality that I 
hesitate to accuse even Microsoft of such lunacy. <g> Or perhaps 
Microsoft has finally come up with the holy grail of search engine 
technology, and developed a search tool that can parse the 
documentation and figure out context?

I'm not up on the state of the academic art of artificial intelligence, 
but nothing I've read in the popular science press suggests that this 
kind of conceptual breakthrough is imminent. With modern technology, 
you can go quite a long way with stemming, exact vs. close matches, 
synonyms, proximity searches, and careful use of boolean terms (and, 
or, not), but this is way beyond the skill level of most computer 
users.

<<I have also heard that this is not a final final decision but that it 
is likely to be passed (I got this info in a seminar attended given by 
Weilenski (sp?) of WritersUA)>>

If that's correct, it's time we stood up for the users of our help 
systems and insisted that Microsoft include indexing and TOC 
capabilities in their help technology. If the search tool is so great, 
maybe these will be _less_ necessary, but until the new technology is 
proven to be even half as good as Microsoft thinks, I think it's a 
disastrous decision to remove two proven tools from our toolkit.

Any Microsofties out there who can tell us how to make our voices 
heard? Char, do you have the ear of anyone at Microsoft willing to 
listen to us?

<<At any rate, I do get complaints from time to time from users, that 
thus and so is wrong in the index, or that so and so should be in the 
index, etc, which says to me that at least some of our users use the 
index.>>

This follows my feelings. Indeed, I rarely find what I'm looking for 
using the search tools built into modern software, and have a much 
higher success rate when I have access to a half-competent or better  
index. That might be a criticism of my search skills, but given that 
I'm quite successful with judicious tweaking of Google, I'm not 
prepared to concede that point.

<<Moreover, our training personnel and professional services (support) 
personnel have requested that the TOC be reorganized based on customer 
comments/confusion.>>

By any chance are you generating the TOC automatically rather than 
designing one that supports the user's needs? Intelligent design of the 
topic titles and hierarchy can make an automatically generated TOC an 
effective tool, and if yours isn't working, you need to reconsider both 
aspects of your TOCs.

In my experience, users also benefit from relevant special-purpose TOCs 
in addition to the ones generated automatically. For example, in some 
software I documented a few years back, there were a couple different 
ways to approach the software metaphor, so I manually created a TOC to 
support both approaches, and included that as a help topic in the 
autogenerated TOC. It seems to have been very well received based on 
feedback from our testers and trainer, but I have no statistics to 
support that viewpoint.

<<Do you think it is worthwhile to expend energy in developing a really 
tight TOC, or one at all? Ditto for the index?>>

Put me down as an enthusiastic supporter of both, for the reasons 
listed above. Make both optional, but don't rob us of these valuable 
tools.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --
Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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