Commentary 21 Someone to w h o m you can explain the barest details of an application, and who can respond by presenting in simple terms (or even doing) the steps that will arrive at a solution. Calling on someone already well versed in an application is certainly the most effective, and perhaps the most common, form of online help available today. What Carroll is really telling us is what every technical writer has already experienced. There are so many degrees of freed o m in audience requirements that every manual, no matter how well designed and written, will always fail deliver all that is demanded of it. User documentation is not about w.riting, it is really about the computer-human interface. Although writing has played a major role in the past, it is only one medium of communication, and in the broader understanding of documentation as user support, a role that is decreasing. Just as computer science struggles with the erroneous perception that "computing equals programming," in documentation it is "user documentation equals writing." The present transition from paper documentation to online documentation and graphic user interfaces is only the first of many steps that will lead to
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Comments on Balloon Help
Price, Jonathan
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 17 (2)
Association for Computing Machinery – May 1, 1993
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