Documentation: Not yet implemented but coming soon!
Brad Mehlenbacher

1. Myths about Documentation
   • Nobody reads documentation
     • Users don't use it effectively (ie., users are "idiots")
     • Documentation is too complex or too limited
     • Documentation can't be created until the product is being developed
     • Online documentation is hardcopy documentation, only it's online
     • Poor documentation doesn't hurt sales or a product's usefulness.
   • Transparent interfaces will eventually eliminate documentation
     • Putting documentation online solves the problem
     • Task-oriented documentation is all that's required
     • Guidelines for interfaces and documentation will improve them
     • Intelligent agents, speech recognition, wizards, guides, and gizmos reduce need for support.
2. Why is Documentation so Difficult
   • Our users/audiences are changing
     • Fewer experts
     • Fewer users developing expertise
     • More transfer users
     • More diverse users.
   • The purposes for reading are growing
     • Reading to do (to perform a task)
     • Reading to learn (to learn about something)
     • Reading to assess (to figure out the document's contents, usefulness)
     • Reading to learn to do (to acquire knowledge for completing tasks later).
   • Our applications are changing
     • Creeping featurism and deceptive intuitiveness
     • Tasks that depend on support materials
     • Bandwidth and peripheral considerations
     • The terminologies of technologies
     • Multimodal interactions and converging incompatibilites
     • Version evolution and legacy challenges.
3. Defining Documentation
   • By audience knowledge and attributes
     • Experience (experts, transfer users, novices)
     • Demographics (education, economic, geographic, sub-cultural)
     • Learning styles (visual/textual, global/sequential, reflective/active, ...)
     • Literacies (domain, computer, textual, visual)
     • Abilities (cognitive, physical)
     • Affective attributes (attitude, motivation, engagement).
   • By task type
     • Representing problems
     • Accessing information
     • Navigating information
     • Scanning information
     • Understanding or comprehending information
     • Transferring information back to primary tasks.
   • By information goal
     • Goal exploration (what can I accomplish with this application?)
     • Definitional and descriptive (what is this? what is it for?)
     • Procedural and immediate (how do I do this?)
     • Diagnostic and state explication (what just happened? where am I?)
     • Example-based and medium-term (how does this example work? how do I copy it step-by-step? what are its various parts?)
     • Conceptual and long-term (how do all these application features work together? what would I like to learn how to do with this application?).
   • By physical and rhetorical differences in media
     • Resolution
     • Display area
     • Aspect ratio
     • Presence
     • Organizational
     • Navigational
     • Contextual.
   • By genre or information type
     • Product packaging and labelling
     • Getting started guide
     • User's guide
     • Reference manual
     • Read-me files
     • Error feedback
     • Context-sensitive help messages
     • Stand-alone online help
     • Tutorial
     • Guide, coach, or wizard
     • Online documentation.
4. Documentation Development
   • Needs assessment
     • What should our support materials accomplish?
     • What are the support materials of our competitors accomplishing?
     • What kinds of support can we realistically develop and maintain?
     • What features are most and least useful?
     • What features are most and least difficult to produce?
   • Product specifications
     • Audience profiles
     • Topic outlines
     • Style/design specifications
     • Project responsibilities
     • Review protocols
     • Development schedules
     • Cost estimates
     • Dependencies and risks
     • Sign-off goals.
   • Design Goals for support materials
     • Accessibility
     • Maintainability
     • Metaphors and structure
     • Support on support
     • Organization and consistency
     • Navigation and modelessness
     • Visual aesthetics
     • Levels of explanation and content
     • Information fast-tracks (headings, lists, iconic markers, indexes).
   • Evaluating support materials
     • Forming an evaluation team
     • Identifying evaluation goals
     • Selecting evaluation methods
     • Developing realistic scenarios
     • Enlisting real users
     • Implementing the evaluation
     • Analyzing the data
     • Implementing changes.
5. Challenges in Documentation: Information Futures
   • Collaborative cooperation, diversity, and documentation management
     • Large, integrated documents are complex artifacts
     • Collaboration requires management, design, and writing
     • Work processes, emotional ownership, and revision challenges
     • Documentation almost always follows application development
     • Ethics, information design, legal and marketing goals.
   • Minimalism meets eLearning
     • Information delivery, audience, task, and context for use understanding.
     • Economic pressures and constraints driving information types and amounts
     • Globalization or localization of support materials
     • Methods for assessing documenation success.
   • Convergence, confusion, and corporate coordination
     • Object-oriented applications and support material ownership
     • Multimedia, data visualization, and PDA developments
     • Internationalization and translation
     • Defining where support materials begin and end
     • Code developers and programmers versus information developers.