Activity: Develop Support
Materials
Purpose
- To develop the end-user support material.
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| Role:
Technical Writer
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| Frequency: In each iteration. |
| Input Artifacts:
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Resulting Artifacts:
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| Tool Mentors:
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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.
- Use graphics to support your text. This clarifies concepts and instructions, and it
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.
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