Activity: Develop Support Materials
Purpose
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| Input Artifacts: | Resulting Artifacts: |
| Frequency: In each iteration. | |
| Worker: Technical Writer | |
| Workflow Details: |
Writing good end-user materials involves the following practices:
- Organize information for ease of access.
- Write instructions in such a way that they are easy to follow.
- Structure the information so that it is easy to skim, yet provide sufficient information for novices.
- Clearly differentiate between types of information, such as concepts, background, purpose, feedback, and actions.
- Support you text with graphics to clarify concepts and instructions. This also helps reduce the number of words needed.
- Explanations should be supported by examples to help users apply new information to their context.
End-user support materials today are for most professionally designed products produced as applications on their own, such as help systems or web sites. Producing such an application is often a project in its own right, and needs to follow the following steps in each iteration of the lifecycle [HAC97]:
- Produce a high level plan for the information that is to be presented.
- Specify the contents in detail.
- Implement the information contents.
- Test and produce the materials.
- Evaluate.
