Quick Start Guide redux

[ccardimon]

I'm back in the Quick Start Guide business again. Deadlines changed, and the QSG I WAS doing became a regular user guide.

Faced with another tight deadline and a complex interface, my supervisor has suggested I write a QSG.

Does anyone have anything to add to our previous discussion of this topic:

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... ence+Guide

Further hints, tips, or suggestions are welcome.

[GregStenhouse]

Start with your page layout and size (i.e. double sided Letter, tri fold, etc). Make it look nice (color?), perhaps a diagram on the first page with callouts to the major UI features. Then choose the top 5? most common tasks, and document those in the simplest way possible. Exactly how much info you can include will depend on your layout. And expect about 20% more info to be added after your review (so allow for expansion afer the initial review, e.g., start with large space after headings etc).

Cheers
Greg

[KevinDAmery]

Another good piece of content would be anything that every new user has trouble with (assuming your app suffers from such a thing).

[ksoltys]

Check out Tom Johnson's blog, I'd Rather Be Writing. He has written several posts about quick start guides, and collected some of them here: http://www.idratherbewriting.com/quickreferenceguides/

He gave a presentation about quick start guides at the STC Summit in Atlanta this year. It's probably the same as the slides on the page above.

[ccardimon]

Check out Tom Johnson's blog, I'd Rather Be Writing. He has written several posts about quick start guides, and collected some of them here: http://www.idratherbewriting.com/quickreferenceguides/

He gave a presentation about quick start guides at the STC Summit in Atlanta this year. It's probably the same as the slides on the page above.

Many thanks. Looks like a gold mine. I kinda wish Flare had a "Quick Start Guide" mode.

[ccardimon]

Has anyone here used Flare to create a Quick Reference Guide?

[GregStenhouse]

Not personally, and I don't think Flare is well designed to do that job. Most QRC's I've seen are visually appealing, with heavy graphic content, callouts, arrows, CMYK color, fancy fonts etc, and take a lot of tweaking line spacing, before and after margins, and leading. Quite often those tweaks are local to 1 or 2 paragraphcs rather than throughout the whole guide. Flare either does not support some of those things, or it takes a lot more time to achieve in Flare than other tools. As an example, for visual content you'd spend a lot of time in a graphics program and exporting to something like PNG to bring it into Flare. Or for local margin tweaking you'd have to setup another style in CSS to get the effect you want.

IMHO tools used to create marketing brochures and the like are better suited to this type of deliverable - with strengths in page layout and graphics rather than styles and consistency. I am using CorelDraw for ours.

Cheers
Greg

[forfear]

IMHO tools used to create marketing brochures and the like are better suited to this type of deliverable - with strengths in page layout and graphics rather than styles and consistency. I am using CorelDraw for ours.

Agree with everything said earlier.
Interesting indeed!
I just do it in Word. Its not fancy in terms of layout, the whole idea is just to fit as much in one page as possible.