Is the Help Helpful? How to Create Online Help That Meets Your Users' Needs Review

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(More customer reviews)This book brings together many aspects of writing technical documentation, with the specific focus of writing online help. It's like "Managing Your Documentation Projects" (Hackos, 1994), but for online help projects, without assuming a large doc department or heavy-weight processes. The first chapter summarizes the help development process as an introduction to planning a project, including the benefits and pitfalls of each step. The later chapters each focus on a specific phase, task, or issue in the process. I'm perplexed by the complaints of "Unhappy Buyer" about the task-oriented headings and bullet points in "Is the Help Helpful?", as I found those to be among the most helpful features of this book.
The book does not assume you are using any particular help technology or help authoring tools (though these are summarized in an appendix). So, for example, while Chapter 6 covers issues in producing a table of contents and index, you may need to refer to other sources for instructions in how to implement them with the specific technology and tool you are using.
Many of the topics covered in this book are addressed in greater depth in other books; an appendix offers a list of references for further reading. To really understand all these issues, you would need to read several books. However, you could read all those other books, and still not get the focus on online help offered by this one.

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Intended for technical writing students, project managers, writers, editors, and others involved in the production of online help, this guide presents the full cycle of help content development, regardless of the operating system running the application, the type of help being produced, or the tools used to produce it. The 10 most common complaints that users have with online help, the causes of these underlying problems, and ways to avoid them are discussed in detail. Eleven steps in the ideal help development process, their benefits, and the problems that arise when a step is left out are also included. Techniques for planning, writing, editing, reviewing, and testing online help are covered and sample specifications, outlines, and maps for a help project are provided.

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