Issues in Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating a Help System  

The design team for a major new product approached our publications group about ideas on developing an online manual and/or online help. Together, we developed a task-oriented, easy-to-use online help system, and continue to work together to evaluate it. Where do we best put the buttons that access the help for various subsystems?

Evans, Jeanette P. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Quality and Information Product Development  

Quality is defined as customer satisfaction, and an information product can be online or paper. With this in mind, basic steps in developing one kind of quality information product – online help – include: determine contents in terms of resources and user needs, develop a style guide, develop a prototype, test and redesign, and be open to change. It is easy to adapt these steps to apply to any information product. Quality is even further assured by placing these steps into a quality improvement process model context that includes identifying outputs, determining customers and customer requirements, converting requirements into processes, measuring outputs, and evaluating results.

Evans, Jeanette P. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>Quality

Quality Online Help Development  

Basic steps to developing successful online help include content planning based on available resources and user needs, use of a style guide, effective design and access, prototype development, usability studies, and being open to changes. Defining “quality” as “customer satisfaction” we can place the online help development process into the context of a continuous quality process model that focuses on meeting customer needs. This quality process includes identifying output, identifying customer and customer requirements, converting requirements into processes, measuring the output, and evaluating results.

Evans, Jeanette P. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Seven Steps to Successful Online Help  

How do you create an effective online help system and efficiently manage the project? This paper will cover some basics of practical online help design and project management. The presentation includes examples from a project we worked on.

Evans, Jeanette P. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Using Visual Techniques to Enhance Usability  

Effective visual design enhances the overall success of a manual as much as, if not more than, the other factors that go into its makeup. The presentation shows how we redesigned a 2-volume manual into a 6-volume manual and otherwise maximized the visual impact of the manual. The many examples of improved visual presentations show how important effective visual design is to the overall impact of the manual. While we also changed stylistic and organizational elements of the manual, we found the impact of the changes in the visual elements most powerful.

Evans, Jeanette P. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Usability>Visual Rhetoric

The Virtual Classroom: Real-life Experiences of Distance Learners  

Distance Learning is becoming the way of the future in education. Today, many universities offer graduate level education through distance learning programs. This panel will examine Mercer University and Utah State University’s online graduate Technical Communication programs. Panelists will share their experiences and discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and costs of Mercer and USU’s online programs.

Evans, Jeanette P., Susan Gonzalez, Becky Roberts and Betty Roberts. STC Proceedings (1999). Presentations>Education>Online

Web Delivery of Corporate Policies and Procedures  

Moving policies and procedures to a corporate web site can improve an ineffective and inefficient delivery system of paper in a three-ring binder. The advantages of online delivery outweigh the disadvantages. Using a general problem solving process, the team that produced this output included customer surveys to determine that a web site was the best way to solve existing delivery problems. The team continues to evaluate the end result, attempting to improve the delivery method.

Evans, Jeanette P. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Documentation>Policies and Procedures