Designing Online Documentation

By William Horton

1994, 439 pages, ISBN: 0-471-30635-5
Published by:John Wiley & Sons

Written by an internationally renowned pioneer in the field of technical communication, this is an incomparable guide to the art and science of creating online documents and documentation systems.

Rather than concentrating on any one particular program or operating system, William cuts to the heart of effective human-computer interaction and extrapolates a set of universal principles that can be applied to any form of online documentation-from messages, menus, and help files, to computer tutorials and hypertexts. Maintaining an end-users perspective throughout, he guides you step by step through every crucial design decision without ever losing sight of the final goal-clear, effective online documentation that people enjoy using. Features include:

• Proven techniques that help reduce support and training costs for software products, eliminate the need for paper documentation, make programs more appealing and easier to use, and more.
• A practical, hands-on approach, supported by the latest research and supplemented with dozens of case studies and illustrations.
• Includes new chapters on multimedia and computer-based training.
• Comprehensive coverage of all online documentation media-words, graphics, animation, and sound.
• Updated information on organizing and structuring documents-with examples from Windows, OS/2, and Macintosh interfaces.

This is the course book used in our workshop Electronic documents by design .