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Re: Doc Design and Convention - to address Gene's take on
Subject:Re: Doc Design and Convention - to address Gene's take on From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au> To:Techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 9 Nov 2009 09:24:56 +0800 (WST)
Janice Gelb wrote:
> However, the engineers in question figured
> "Oh, this won't take too much time and I'm in there anyway"
...
> In one case, the engineers added an option with an
> icon to a main GUI menu because they thought it would
> be more helpful to users to get directly to a feature
> rather than going through a submenu. Even though we
> were at beta. And numerous screen shots that included
> the main menu had already been taken.
It's pretty common that engineers don't have a good idea of the consequences for documentation of a software change. At one extreme, major software changes relating to a bug fix or performance improvement can have no impact on the docs--they're just making the product work the way the manual said it was supposed to work. In the same way, apparently trivial last-minute UI changes can be a major pain for the TW.
Stuart
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