Renamable Terms

Subject: Renamable Terms
From: Bonni Graham <bonnig -at- IX -dot- NETCOM -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 10:42:08 -0800

Hi folks!

I'm currently documenting a product for a client. This product includes
item names that can be changed to reflect the users' needs. The new
name appears in printed information, and on all the program's title bars
and dialog boxes. Unfortunately, this means that the only items not
reflecting the custom name are the paper manual & the online help. In
my previous experience, the only things that could be customized were
field names on data entry screens, and we recommended that they keep a
table of the changes posted somewhere. This solved the paper doc
problem, and there was no online help.

I'm not so worried about the paper manual -- I think reasonable users
will realize that the paper doc is not going to change magically to
reflect their custom names. Unreasonable users are their own punishment
(after all, they have to be themselves for the rest of their lives, no?)

What I'm concerned about is the online help, since it always appears to
be much more of a part of the *program*. My client is worried that
users will expect to see their changes automatically reflected in the
help. I'm not so concerned -- I don't think they will, but I don't
want to bet my record for excellence on that assumption.

I'm indexing and keywording the most common item alternates (we have a
list of industry regulars) so there are entry points, even though the
information itself will bear the default names.

In your experience, do users understand that the help text is not going
to reflect any custom changes? (Please note: I'm not sure that the
person who customized the names is ever going to be the only person
touching the program, so I can't count on the user just remembering that
her or she just changed the name.) If not, what methods have you used to
ameliorate the problem? I was planning on setting customizable names in
a different type (probably bold italic, or something) and then noting
the convention in Conventions at the front of the book.

Thanks in advance for the helpful replies I just KNOW I'm going to get!

Bonni Graham
Owner, Manual Labour
bonnig -at- ix -dot- netcom -dot- com


Previous by Author: Moderate techwr-l?
Next by Author: Re: Technical Presentation Skills
Previous by Thread: SIGNOFF
Next by Thread: Re: Renamable Terms


What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:

Sponsored Ads


Sponsored Ads
http://www.techwr-l.com/archives/9501/techwhirl-9501-00179.html
www.techwr-l.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-22
20163
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PDZSGULGZVRAZSHRUSRRRR5FNN5FB2VM
<urn:uuid:5d7bc2fd-957f-47eb-ae8b-334a62e2f556>
2018-05-22T12:05:25Z
184.106.92.169
text/html
sha1:TETVT4IIM72DPI6XJETOXFW3SR7TLHRT
<urn:uuid:387ae8d5-1f36-4602-8352-1dcde159db7d>
http://www.techwr-l.com/archives/9501/techwhirl-9501-00179.html
length
response
<urn:uuid:5999fafd-df2f-4cf1-934e-93a7daf98b90>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-157-137-107.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf