- Poornima Padmanabhan
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are very quickly becoming portable, miniaturized personal computers. The design of effective online Help for PDAs is a challenge because their increasing capacities cannot easily overcome their inherent limitations.
Designing online Help for PDAs is a marked shift from designing for personal computers because the reduced memory capacity and display-unit size (a VGA screen of 300x240 pixels) of PDAs mandate Help formats optimized in ways not necessary with larger machines. Current Help files on PDAs are simple HTML files, but this format might prove inadequate for the complex Help files needed for more elaborate software applications. Thus it is necessary to explore strategies for online Help that work within the limitations of small-screen devices.
Provide Multiple Pathways and Entry Points
Software users do not need linear information, but rather quick direct access to relevant, specific information. Providing multiple entry points and pathways for users to access information leads to a more usable design because it allows navigational choice. Access to the Help files can be provided from the master list of installed Help files, as well as contextually from the software application. Multiple pathways at the topic level enable faster information seeking through related topic buttons, navigation trails, links to different information types (overview, procedure, example, etc.), or even links to multimedia versions of the Help scenario. A combination of these strategies could overcome limitations of screen real estate and aid selection of entry points using the stylus.
Separate Logical Information Types
Information classification is not a new concept in technical communication, and it can be used beneficially in documentation for PDAs. More specifically, Information Mapping (IMAP®), the structured writing method designed by Robert Horn, is based on the principle of categorization and identifies more than 40 information types (principle, description, example, etc.). Horn’s studies indicate that users find structured information easy to scan and comprehend. Content management systems work on the same principle, using metadata to classify information so users can access that information by its tags. This multi-tagged format can be employed in small-screen devices, in which the Help topic window can be designed with tags containing different types of information.
Use Information Summarization Techniques
Because of the non-linear nature of Web reading and the large number of navigational pathways available on the Web, the Power Browser Project focused on how Web links can be summarized for small-screen users. The results include five methods of summarization to facilitate Web browsing, navigation, and searching. These methods break up Web-based information into Semantic Textual Units (STU), information blocks such as paragraphs, lists, and ALT tags. STUs are then ordered into hierarchies. Taking a similar approach, QuikScan, a document summarization technique developed by David Farkas and Quan Zhou, enables quick, selective access to important ideas in documents. QuikScan uses highlighting, boxed summaries, and previewing to facilitate easy scanning and reading, and to summarize essential conceptual takeaways. Applying these summarization techniques on PDAs could help users retrieve information in the shortest possible time.
Summary
These strategies are based on user-centered design research, and they can potentially address issues associated with online Help in PDAs. Usability studies will prove whether this is the case.
Poornima Padmanabhan is a technical writer at Digifonica Canada Limited. Her interests lie in user research, usability testing, and technical communication theory. References for this article can be obtained from Poornima at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).