Making Online Information Usable
http://www.uie.com/articles/online_information/

User Interface Engineering

Abstract:

So you follow all the standards and guidelines, but suffer nagging questions about whether anyone can and will use the help you’ve just written. Or management wants you to move your printed documentation online, but you wonder whether that’s really best for your users. In the course of our consulting work, we’ve done dozens of usability studies that focus on how people use a variety of printed and online documentation, including manuals, help, cue-cards, and wizards. We’d like to share some of our results and observations, in hopes that this will help you make more informed design decisions.