Skip to main content

The Design of New Technology for Writing On-line Help

  • Conference paper
  • 153 Accesses

Abstract

This paper presents an instance of the design of new technology in the domain of technical writing. We are proposing a novel tool for technical writers called Isolde*. Isolde has the potential to change substantially the technical writing process as well as the place of technical writers in a software development team. Consequently, Isolde has been designed through the collaboration of end-users and human computer interaction specialists. This paper shows how its design has evolved from technical and user related considerations, ensuring that Isolde is both feasible and desirable. The paper also discusses the use and place of this new technology in the technical writers’ work environment.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Balbo, S. and Lindley, C. (1997), Adaptation of a Task Analysis Methodology to the Design of a Decision Support System, in S. Howard, J. Hammond and G. K. Lindgaard (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction — INTERACT’97: Proceedings of the Fifth IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Chapman and Hall, pp. 355–61.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barthet, M.-F. (1988), Logiciels interactifs et ergonomie, modèles et méthodes de conception, Dunod Informatique Ed., Paris.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, J. M. (1990), The Nurnberg Funnel: Designing Minimalist Instruction for Practical Computer Skill,MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • DOCSTEP (1995), “DOCSTEP: Product Documentation Creation and Management using STEP”, MLAP-94 Project 63557; Project Summary published in the Project Fact Sheet Directory, Second Language Engineering Convention, London, November 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartley, A. F. and Paris, C. L. (1996), Automatic Text Generation for Software Development and Use, in H. Somers (ed.), Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in language engineering in honour of Juan C. Sager, John Benjamins., Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 221–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartley, A. F. and Paris, C. L. (in preparation), Towards an Empirical Characterization of the Discourse of Software Instructions, Technical Report, ITRI, University of Brighton. See also Hartley, A.F. and Paris, C.L. (1995) Drafter: French Corpus Analysis and Grammatical Description, WP14/WP15 Deliverable, Drafter Project IED4/1/5827, EPSRC grant number J19221.

    Google Scholar 

  • INDOCREN (1995), “INDOCREN: Intelligent Document Creation Environment”, MLAP-94 Project 63033; Project Summary published in the Project Fact Sheet Directory, Second Language Engineering Convention, London, November 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lu, S., Paris, C. and Vander Linden, K. (1998), Towards Automatic Construction of Task Models from Object-Oriented Diagrams, in S. Chatty and P. Dewan (eds.), Proceedings of the IFIP Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction 1998, Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paris, C. and Vander Linden, K. (1996a), “DRAFTER: An Interactive Support Tool for Writing Multilingual Instructions”, IEEE Computer 29(7), 49–56. Special Issue on Interactive Natural Language Processing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paris, C. and Vander Linden, K. (1996b), An Overview of On-Line Documentation and CASE Tools, Technical Report ITRI-95–16, ITRI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paris, C., Ozkan, N. and Balbo, S. (1997), “Novel Uses of Task Models: Two Case Studies”, NATO/ONR Workshop on Cognitive Task Analysis, Washington DC, November.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paris, C., Vander Linden, K. and Lu, S. (in press), A Practical Approach to the Generation of Online Help, in Proceedings of Natural Language Processing and Industrial Applications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paris, C., Vander Linden, K., Fischer, M., Hartley, A., Pemberton, L., Power, R. and Scott, D. (1991), A Support Tool for Writing Multilingual Instructions, in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’95), Morgan Kaufmann, pp.1398–404. Also available as ITRI report ITRI-95–11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parkinson, A. (1996), “Highlights — 43rd STC Annual Conference”, url:http://hstc.org/region7/region7/cwc/www/coastlines/conference.html.

  • Pemberton, L. (1996), Requirements from Technical Writing, Technical Report, ITRI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pemberton, L., Gorman, L., Hartley, A. and Power, R. (1996), Computer Support for Producing Software Documentation: Some Possible Futures, in M. Sharpies and T. van der Geest (eds.), The New Writing Environment: Writers at Work in a World of Technology, Springer-Verlag, pp.59–72. Also available as the ITRI Technical Report number ITRI94–10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rational Software Corporation (1997), Unified Modelling Language, Notation Guide, v.1.0.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sayers, K. (1996), “A Look at Trends of the Profession”, url: http://www.stc.org/cwc/www/coastlines/trends.html

  • Thimbleby, H. and Addison, M. (1996), “Intelligent Adaptive Assistance and Its Automatic Generation”, Interacting with Computers 8 (1), 51–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tarby, J.-C. (1994), The Automatic Management of Human-Computer Dialogue and Contextual Help, in B. Blumenthal, J. Jornostaev and C. Unger (eds.), Proceedings of EWHCI’94: The East-West International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tarby, J.-c. and Barthet, M.-F. (1995), The DIANE+ Method, in J. Vanderdonckt (ed.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces, Presses Universtaires de Namur, pp. 95–119.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1998 Springer-Verlag London

About this paper

Cite this paper

Paris, C., Ozkan, N., Bonifacio, F. (1998). The Design of New Technology for Writing On-line Help. In: Johnson, H., Nigay, L., Roast, C. (eds) People and Computers XIII. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3605-7_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3605-7_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76261-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3605-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics