Accessibility

RoboHelp Article

 

Creating Online Help (Part 1): Design and Development Considerations


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Basic Types of Help Systems
  3. Design Principles and Concepts
  4. Three Major Steps to Creating a Help Project and Help Topic Types
  5. Anatomy of a Procedure Topic

Creating a Help Project: The Three Major Steps

In a very general way, there are three major steps to creating a Help Project:

  1. Create Help topics.
  2. Define the Help windows that will display the Help topics.
  3. Design ways to navigate to the Help topics.

Creating Help topics is the same thing as creating the content that will display inside your Help window. Next, you'll explore some of the types of topics you can create.

Help Topic Types

There are a wide range of topic types that you can use inside an online Help system. I'll review some of the other types later in this section. For now, let's review some of the more basic topic types.

Welcome topics

A Welcome topic is typically the first topic in a Help system, and presents the overall purpose of a Help system. Examples of a Welcome topic are, “Welcome,” or “Getting Started.”

Overview style topics

Overview style topics provide conceptual and background information about a subject. Their purpose is to create a sense of context for procedures to follow in other topics. This type of topic typically begins with a heading presented as a modified noun (such as the heading of this paragraph).

Procedure style topics

Procedure style topics present a series of steps helping users accomplish a specific task. Many procedure style topics begin with a heading describing some kind of activity. One example is, "Creating a Topic."

Often, procedure topics begin with a brief conceptual introduction, followed by a series of steps. The conceptual overview may be followed or replaced by an infinitive like, “To Create a Topic inside the Project Tab.” Sometimes these steps are broken into more than one series. A new series may begin with a subheading such as, “To Create a New Topic while inside the TOC Composer.”

Definition style topics

Definition style topics are brief definitions often displayed in a pop-up window. They help a user understand terminology within a larger Help topic without compelling the user to leave the topic and distract their focus.

What’s This? style topics

What’s This? style topics are small pop-up topics users may display by clicking an interface feature in an application to provide a brief description of the feature. A What’s This? style topic is not typically designed to be task-oriented, but simply describes specific functions on the application interface.

Other topic types

Other topics may include Error messages, troubleshooting topics, topics displayed within multimedia presentations, or screen-region topics where graphics may be used to describe parts of an application.

Page 4 of 5
Previous Page
Next Page