Commentary 15 New Guises for Recurring Problems in Documentation Stephen W. Draper GIST (Glasgow Interactive Systems Centre) Department of Psychology University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ U.K. steve @psy.gla.ac.uk http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/-steve Introduction Hallgren offers three vivid examples of problems with contemporary software and its documentation, together with the documentation solutions he designed. He also argues three analytic points: that these are complex problems, that improved documentation design should be based on "problem analysis" as well as task analysis, and that a key feature of his solution is providing some conceptual explanation, and not just the shallow procedural instructions characterizing most documentation, and particularly online help. I will discuss all of these mainly from the point of view of the minimalist or action-centered approach to documentation: to what extent do Hallgren's cases and points constitute a challenge, and to what extent are they in fact consistent with that approach? Complexity and contemporary problems in computer documentation Hallgren describes three specific problems created by contemporary software taken with its normal documentation, and convincinglytells us that it baffles typical users. These are (a) a printout problem with QuarkXpress, (b) a quality problem with scanned-in color images in PhotoShop, and (c) a problem
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New guises for recurring problems in documentation
Draper, Stephen W.
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 21 (1)
Association for Computing Machinery – Feb 15, 1997
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