Recommended Reading

  • Horton, William K. Designing and Writing Online Documentation: Hypermedia for Self-Supporting Products. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994.
  • A highly regarded resource for designing and creating online help systems. Also covers other related subjects, such as error messages and menus.

  • Microsoft Corporation. Designing for the User Experience. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1999.
  • See the chapter on user assistance for a good discussion on writing task-oriented Help, Help window design, and the Help topics browser. Also presents useful information on context-sensitive Help, tooltips, status bar text, and Help buttons in dialog boxes.

  • Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, Second Edition. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1998.
  • Provides useful guidelines for all aspects of documentation.

  • Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft Windows 95 Help Authoring Kit. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1995.
  • Appendix A, "Windows 95 Help Style Guidelines," presents an excellent discussion on modern, task-oriented Help; the motivation for the Windows 95 Help system design; guidelines for writing Help; Help window design; and many other Help-related topics. It gives useful information on how to integrate context-sensitive Help into your program. It also gives useful strategies for testing and debugging Help.

  • Nielsen, Jakob. Usability Engineering. Chestnut Hill, MA: AP Professional, 1993.
  • Chapter 5, "Usability Heuristics," presents an interesting study of online help that found that 23 percent of the time help requests found no useful information at all. In the cases where users did find help information, the users considered it useful only 35 percent of the time. Although it might seem obvious that Help should be helpful, it cannot be taken for granted.



Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows
Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows
ISBN: 0735605866
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 334

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