Re: Reviewing online help

["Richard Pineger." <Richard_Pineger -at- PAC -dot- CO -dot- UK>]

Geoff Hart wrote:
> I'm not sure what the problem is here. If you've chunked
> your text properly, each topic should have a heading and as
> many subheads as are necessary to sub-chunk the information
> effectively. If that's the case, page numbers should be
> irrelevant.

Thank you Geoff,
          The help system (and program that it describes) has been around
for about 7 years now and I do not have opportunity to restructure it. Your
fundamental assumption that it would be 'chunked' properly does not
apply.
             The technique I have decided to try is to supply a paginated
hard copy with page numbers, an index (containing topic headings) and a
table of contents. I used help2doc.exe to generate a word file and wrote a
macro to generate the index from the topic titles.
          I will also supply the help system to the programmers and arrange
review meetings covering approx 50 pages of the hard copy per meeting. The
50 pages are based around a consecutive list of topics in the table of
contents. The reviewer can either read on-screen then use the index to find
the topic for marking, or, use the printed table of contents followed by
the index to find the topics. Whichever they decide they will have me sat
next to them doing the same while they do it. The links and context IDs
will be tested separately. Indeed, the context IDs have already been
tested.

Richard Pineger

	http://www.documentation.com/, or http://www.dejanews.com/