System Documentation Design Ideas

[edarsow]

Brainstormed Ideas for Help System:

1. A learning object represents a self-contained unit of instruction about a process or feature
   • Written tutorial
   • Audio and/or Video tutorials (ADA compliant pages can provide audio only)
   • Annotated screen shots
2. Role-based training consists of relevant learning objects for that role
3. Body of documentation should be searchable by keyword and return results across all objects/roles
4. Documentation components should be printable and web accessible (Ideally, PDF export)
5. Feature change requests should be tracked such that necessary changes to documentation of those features are bundled in the same tracking workflow.
6. Documentation processes should also respond to version releases
7. "What's new" notices should allow users to understand changes as they happen
8. Design principle: Don't repeat documentation in different objects, instead, break a multi-faceted object into smaller objects that can be arranged as needed. Example: managers may need less or more information than direct user of the process
9. Eventual integration into a normalized relational database

[edarsow]

collapsed into other help system ticket