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[description], Story, any other text you want to use. Writing Helpful Help – A Minimalism Checklist by: Glenn Murray User documentation is all too often written by programmers for programmers. It tends to focus on the product's features, rather than the user's tasks. Generally, programmers aren't in the ideal position to be writing user documentation. They're too close to the bits and bytes, and they're too far from the user. To them, what the product can do tends to be far more important than what the user can do with the product. It's a subtle – but vital – distinction. Research shows that the key to effective user documentation is writing task oriented help. Even better, write your help according to the minimalist theory. In the documentation world, "minimalism" is a fancy word for a commonsense practice. In basic terms, it means write to your reader and keep it simple. The theory itself has a lot of twists and turns. If you want to read a great – but slightly wordy – book on the subject, check out the book "Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel", 1998, edited by John Carroll. In the meantime, if you can tick every item in the following checklist, you'll be well on your way to usable online help that both your readers and your managers will thank you for. Helpful Help Checklist 1. Base the help on real tasks (or realistic examples) 2. Structure the help based on task sequence – Chapter headings should be goals and topics should be tasks 3. Respect the reader's activity – this is generally more about what you don't do than what you do. Don't waste the reader's time by diving off into tangents 4. Exploit prior knowledge and experience – Draw the reader's attention to previous tasks, experiences, successes, and failures 5. Prevent mistakes - "Ensure you do x before doing y" 6. Detect and identify mistakes - "If this fails, you may have entered the path incorrectly" 7. Fix mistakes - "Re-enter the path" 8. Provide error info at end of tasks where necessary (rule of thumb, one error info note per three tasks is a good average) 9. Don't break up instructions with notes, cautions, warnings, and exceptional cases - Put these things at the end of the instruction, wherever possible 10. Be brief, don't spell everything out, especially things that can be taken for granted 11. Omit conceptual and note information where possible, or link to it. Perhaps provide expansion information at the end of the topic, plus maybe a note that there are other ways to perform the task/goal, but this is the easiest 12. Sections should look short and read short 13. Provide closure for sections (e.g., back to original screen/goal) 14. Provide an immediate opportunity to act and encourage exploration and innovation (use active invitations to act, such as, "See for yourself..." or "Try this..." rather than passive invitations such as, "You can...") 15. Get users started quickly 16. Allow for reading in any order - make each section modular, especially goals, but perhaps tasks (definitely if they can be performed in different order) 17. Highlight things that are not typical 18. Use active voice rather than passive voice 19. Try to account for the user's environment in your writing 20. Before writing anything, ask yourself "Will this help my reader?" By building these practices into your documentation process, you'll find that your online help becomes easier to write, shorter, and far more usable for your reader. What's more, your boss will love you!
webradio
Important privacy considerations when shopping for webradioThe Internet is fast becoming the dominant medium for business and communication, but it still resembles something of a frontier, because there is little regulation. If you are looking for webradio then you are doing so in an unregulated marketplace. Most efforts have relied on the Internet industry to police itself. Although there has been some notable success with self-policing, continued abuses have increased calls for government intervention. That's where our role in pre-checking webradio sites comes in. Our webradio provider is solid and reliable. Some aspects of the Internet could undoubtedly use some regulation, but this task is not as simple as it may seem. The very nature of the Internet makes it difficult, if not impossible to regulate. However in the midst of this many webradio retailers survive and prosper. At the same time, the absence of regulations means that everyone who uses this essentially public network can be a target for anyone who has the technical know-how and the will to invade their privacy. Privacy was foremost in our minds when sourcing the right webradio retailer for you. Their link appears below. While the threat from hackers is low for individuals, a more serious threat to personal privacy comes from unscrupulous webradio companies that operate websites for quick quids. Many webradio sites require you to register before you can use its services. Often you must provide personal information, such as your name, street address, and e-mail address. Then as you browse the site, data is collected as to which pages you visited, how long you remained on each page, the links you clicked, what terms you searched, and so on. After a number of visits to the site, a personal profile emerges. The question is, what do webradio site operators do with this information? Most claim that they use it to personalize your experience on the site. For instance, if a webradio site learns that you are interested in webradio, the next time you visit the site, you might be presented with an article or advertisements for that and related products. But some webradio websites sell this information to marketers, which means that you may find yourself receiving unwanted catalogs from garden suppliers. Our preferred retailer does not do this. We feel so confident that your webradio shopping experience will be a good one that we have built this site so that you can go straight to the prime webradio retailer without wasting a lot of time checking out vast numbers of very ordinary providers. Real Time Media On The Net Index
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