Example of bulleted text

Here I am taking the first paragraphs of my first post about editing the Blogs@Baruch documentation and re-formatting it to give a visual example of how I see the instructor info being written in short bursts with screenshots:

Probably everything the instructor needs to know is there..somewhere…but I am going on my own somewhat A.D.D. response to user manuals in guessing that we need a lot more subheadings or indexing so that users spend the absolute minimum amount of time locating the specific info they need.

  1. My first thought was that we should have every tidbit of info on a separate page, instead of using anchors to take readers to the part of the section on the page where their info is located.  But, actually, I think Apple does this with their troubleshooting pages, and it’s a bit too pared down, as you can see from this example:Applecare pageYou have to keep going back to some FAQ page or search box to find even closely related info.
  2. My second thought was to get rid of the Beginner/ Intermediate/ Advanced subsections, since that requires the user to know enough to guess what info falls under which subheading.  But actually I think those subgroupings can be useful, as long as there’s another way to find the info besides searching in that section or reading through a list of questions in an FAQ list.

So, I think actually a Beg./ Intermed./ Advanced grouping is fine, and should be cross-referenced with an FAQ list:

  • in very short bulleted phrases
  • and with instructions given in both a logical chronology as well as in alphabetical order for the impatient user.
  • I think this could be accomplished by lots more “How do I _______?” FAQs that index every aspect of different tasks, as well as a list of keywords in alpha. order with links to their relevant sections.