Case Study: IdeaWeaver Online Help

Project title: IdeaWeaver HTML Help
Author: Susan Daffron
IdeaWeaver Version: 1.0.6

One thing we've often heard users say is that if the programmers ever were forced to actually USE their own software, the software would be a whole lot different. (A friend calls this "eating your own dog food.")

So we decided to create the IdeaWeaver online help in IdeaWeaver itself. Microsoft has free HTML help tools, so I basically used IdeaWeaver and the freebie compiler that is available from Microsoft's download site.

Getting Started with IdeaWeaver

Because HTML help is extremely linear, I actually started with the outline side of IdeaWeaver. I tend to like help that is task based, so instead of brainstorming ideas first, I brainstormed the things you do with IdeaWeaver and loaded those into the Outline Pane.

Organizing the Content

For the User Guide part of the help, the outline included general things you can do with the product. For example, under "Working with IdeaWeaver Projects" I had Creating a New Project, Opening an Existing Project and Understanding Project Types. I made the command decision to NOT include the idea headings in the export, so actually my idea titles were virtually the same.

The Field Reference section just uses the name of the top level menus and the dialog boxes.

Project Screen Shot

As you can see in the screen, I only set up a couple of categories. One for Field Reference and one for User Guide.

I did set up a number of topics. I wanted to make sure that the places where I talked about parts of the application, such as the Outline or Topics were consistent across ideas. I was able to sort by topic to show just those ideas and look through them quickly.

Lessons Learned

One of the big downsides of creating help for an application IN the application is of course that you sometimes get into situations where you can't be writing down what you're doing, while you are doing it.

Had I been smarter, I would have run two copies of IdeaWeaver; one on my laptop and one on my desktop, so I could see what I was doing.

Making IdeaWeaver Better

One thing that would have been really cool would have been some type of export of the IdeaWeaver data into the Microsoft Windows Help Compiler. Unfortunately the help application isn't particularly smart, so I had to do a lot of copying and pasting from the IdeaWeaver RTF export file into the compiler.

Conclusion

Obviously since I wrote the online help, I know the product a lot better than most people. However, it was still quite an easy way to get a help file done quickly.