Observation
People are visual beings. They look at your product and see a button or display, for example. They want to know about that control or indicator. Visible Index is a simple yet powerful document access tool that enables your readers to find the information they want.
This article describes the visual index concept and explains how to create one for your document.
a visual index
A visual index is a picture of your product or process that contains links to relevant information in a related document. Using a visible index, your readers can look at the picture and can quickly jump to a place in your paper that describes the object of interest.
Your document may contain multiple visual indexes (the plural of "index" is "index" and not "index").
starts with a picture
The visual Index starts with a picture of your product or process. There are different types of drawings to use depending on the product type:
* Physical products (for example, a barbecue or video disc recorder)
Product pictures (all relevant scenes).
* A process or process: A flowchart of the steps and decisions in a process or process.
* Software Product 1: Screenshot of the software.
*Software Product 2: Images before and after the work done by the product.
* Organization: An organization chart.
label the picture
Label all user-product interaction points (U-PIPs) on the picture. A U-PIP is anywhere your user and product can interact. U-PIP includes the product's controls, performance, and relevant physical features (such as handles, latches, etc.). Provide a meaningful (to your reader) label (name) for the U-PIP. (Use the same title everywhere to refer to that U-PIP.)
Also: If your product uses sounds to inform the user, include a table of those sounds, what they mean, and a link in the relevant area of your document (describing the sound).
Link U-PIP to your document
Up until this point, the visual Index is like any well-labeled picture of your product or process. However, when you add links to your document, a well-labeled image becomes a graphical index.
The link should be to the part of your document that you think your reader would most like to access to get information about that U-PIP. (This is a fundamental question whenever you create an index: "Does my reader want to come to this location in my document for this item?")
The way you add a link to a picture depends on the document's publishing mechanism. If the document is published as:
* a printed document, then use the page number for the link;
* An electronic document, then use a hyperlink that the reader can click to follow. If the document is published as HTML, the visual Index may be an image map.
Example 1: Pain in my leg
My leg hurts while walking. If I go to a website about feet, it will be very efficient to find out about my pain if I can see a foot picture with different areas where pain can occur. Links to specific web pages from the foot areas will quickly find information about my particular foot pain.
Example 2: Photo Correction Software
Before and after correction, show a picture with errors that your software can handle. Here u-pip every photo error.
Example 3: A course on writing user documents
A visual index is a flowchart for creating user documents. Since the course is presented in HTML, the visuaIndexex is made from an image map, which for each item in the flowchart contains hyperlinks to the relevant courses' sections.
A visual index is a simple concept. But like many simple concepts, it is mighty. Try to include one in your following document. You will be doing your reader an excellent service.
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