Re: [Usability]<What's this?> button

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 14:24, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> Our documentation team is top notch. They kick *so* much arse. If we build a
> framework to help them add these hints to our applications (similar to the
> way that i18n works), and hopefully integrate them with existing formats, we
> substantially improve their efficiency, visibility *and* our documentation.

First of all I hasten to clarify that I wasn't referring to the
documentation team when I said the rest of us were crap/unfocused on
writing good documentation :)  They undeniably do a fantastic (and
unenviable) job.

I'm just kind of worried that if this feature has disappeared in both
MacOSX (previous versions had balloon help) and WinXP (previous versions
had a 'What's This' button in most dialogs), it's probably for a good
reason.  It may be usability, it may just be documentation resources...
I don't know which.  (Although I do know how much work the docs guys
here have to put in just to help complete the user guides for an
ever-changing product, and writing this sort of help is every bit as
much work again, as it's necessarily not just a matter of
copying-and-pasting bits from the user guide.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771