HELP DESIGN DETAILS

NIST TRAINING & CONSULTANCY SERVICES
(A division of National Institute of Science & Technology)

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Help Design Details

Since help is an important part of any software special care need to be taken while designing help files. The important points to be taken care of while designing help files are as follows:

Defining the audience of the project

The language and content for help project depend on whether the user is an expert or a child.

Planning the contents of the help Project and creating a help topic structure.

Here the help content should cover all of the features that a project can do.

The design document will contain a Table of Contents of the help as shown in example below:

Table of Contents

Introduction

How to do the setup

Guidelines for using the software

this section should include description about all the use cases and scenarios

it should also give description about how to add and delete record and
how to do a search, what are the options available for search in case of
data base applications.

all the cases where the user may go wrong should also be specified

the sequence of working should be properly mentioned.

Working with forms and reports

this section includes detail description about all the forms and reports

the screen dumps of all the forms should be given and described

some sample reports should be given

Examples should be given where ever necessary

Technical Dictionary

Error listing

End user License agreement

Deciding which controls in the application are going to be context-sensitive.

Designing the actual help topics, e.g., writing the topics, adding graphics and multimedia files and using colors.

All form report designers should provide a manual on how to use the form or report with a detail description about the sequence of navigation on the form, any link to other forms, and the controls in HTML format.

The developer should provide screen dumps of the forms and reports with some valid test data to the help project developer. This should also be accompanied by a detailed description on the forms.

The designer will also provide the following tabular list of links from forms and error messages.

Table of Help Links

Context ID	HTML Filename	Title	Keywords
100	frmPassword.htm	Logging into the Software	login, password
110	frmWelcome.htm	Changing the Password	password, user, login
220	err333.htm	Invalid Password	invalid, password, err333

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