Observation
People are visual creatures. They will see your product and see a button or display, for example. They want to know about that control or indicator. Visual Index is a simple yet powerful document access tool that lets your readers find the information they want.
This article explains the concept of visual index and how to create one for your document.
A visual indicator
A visual index is an image of your product or process that contains links to relevant information in a relevant document. Using the Visual Index, your readers can quickly see the picture and go to the place where they describe the interest in your document.
Your document may contain multiple visual indicators (the plural of "index" is not "index" and "index").
Begins with the image
The visual index starts with an image of your product or process. There are different types of drawings to use depending on the product type:
* Physical products (for example, barbecue or video disc recorder)
Product images (all related scenes).
* Process or process: A flowchart of steps and decisions in the process or process.
* Software Product 1: A screenshot of the software.
* Software Product 2: Images before and after the work produced.
* Company: An organization chart.
Label the image
Label all user-generated interactions (U-PIPs) on the image. U-PIP is anywhere where your customer and product can interact. U-PIP includes product controls, performance and related physical features (handle, latch, etc.). Provide a meaningful (for your reader) label (name) for U-PIP. (Use the exact same label everywhere to indicate U-PIP.)
Also: If your product uses sounds to notify users, include a list of those sounds, what they mean and a link (describing the sound) in the relevant area of your document.
Link U-PIP to your document
Until now, the visual index has been like any well-labeled image of your product or process. However, when you add links to your document, a well-labeled image becomes a visual indicator.
To get information about that U-PIP you need to have a link to the part of your document that you think your reader would most want to access. (This is a basic question whenever you create an index: "Do you want my reader to come to this point in my document for this topic?")
The way you add links to images depends on the document's publishing method. If the document is published as follows:
* Print the document, and then use the page number for the link;
* Electronic document, and then use the clickable hyperlink to follow the reader. 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 running. If I go to a website about feet, if I can see a picture of the foot with different areas where the pain occurs, it will be very effective to find out about my pain. Links from foot areas to specific web pages make it quick to find information about my specific foot pain.
Example 2: Photo correction software
Before and after editing, show an image with errors that your software can handle. Every photo error U-PIP is here.
Example 3: A course on writing user documentation
Visual index is a flowchart for creating user documents. As the course is displayed in HTML, a visual index is created from the image map, which contains hyperlinks to the course sections relevant to each item in the flowchart.
Visual index is a common concept. But like many common concepts, it is very powerful. Try to include one in your next document. You will be doing your reader...
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