[Sigia-l] Guidelines for (technical) handbooks

[Andrew Boyd]

On 5/23/07, Luca Rosati <lucarosati at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm interesting in resources on best practices for technical handbook of
> industrial products: document IA (content structure and content access),
> document design, writing, easy of use...
>
> Can you recommend me good stuff?

Hi Luca,

without going into the best practices merrygoround, the most useful
UCD-of-information-support book I ever came across was Hackos and
Redish: User and Task Analysis for Interface Design - there are a
couple of chapters that talk about information support systems
(including documentation).

Without getting onto my holistic information support horse... I would
only add that the only best practice I could actually call such would
be this - information support needs to be considered in context of the
environment, and "we need a user guide" often really means "we need an
information support designer to come along and consider our design
problem". The solution might be a human call center operator, a dead
tree manual, a onepage laminated cheatsheet, a website,
context-sensitive online help, a set of tooltips, a training course,
an onsite evangelist/roving enabler, or a combination of any/all of
the above. This is probably the last great untapped market as far as
effective client service goes. The perfect system would need no
information support - designer hubris insists that most designs are
perfect, which we who work in the real world is rarely the case.

Best regards, Andrew

---
Andrew Boyd
http://facibusreviews.com