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Tables of Contents in Help Systems

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Just curious: to what degree do you rely on Tables of Contents (TOCs) in computer Help and documentation systems that are either installed on your local compter or available through web-based assistance sites like MSDN? Please let me know in the comments.

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  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2009
    First of all, unlike many (most of?) people over the world I do see serious progress MS does in its products (for developers and for business and home users). But Help in MS products is still in 1995. MS can now write good software but MS still cannot do good help and, by the way, cannot publish books (which are printed on very thick paper with lots of white space for extra weight). I do understand though that investment in help, especially help for developers, does not mean commercial success. It’s only a matter of good will. For a developer good and complete TOC is extremely important (as well as index).
  1. For instance, consider my favorite technique: if I find interesting/important article in local MSDN, I then go to its Location in TOC to see what the nearest neighbors and roots are. Most of the time these are very important for my current task too!
  2. When articles are not in TOC it's very bad. For instance, when I installed Windows Mobile 6 Pro SDK and integrated it via Combined Collection Manager into MSDN and then tried to review it, many articles were missing from TOC. It's soooo frustrating. I go through TOC clicking when I read about new API, and now I have to visit specific articles to find links to “sub-articles” that are missing from TOC.
  3. I always go through What's New section of TOC of any product important for me (like Microsoft Visual Studio). I click on every location and read the beginning of every item but I don't always read the articles to the end and don't always follow all the links. So if something new is not in TOC I will easily miss it.
  4. Several times a year I look through ONLINE TOCs of Techinal Articles in my areas of interest (Windows CE, windows Mobile). This used to be my primary place to find new information and hints (howtos) about MS products before MS devs started blogging or went to social.msdn.microsoft.com. For instance, try to find on MSDN what POWER_STATE_UNATTENDED really means :)  By the way, “Howto” articles should be linked from within related articles describing API: like, Windows CE VirtualAlloc() article should link to all Doug Boling articles on MSDN and 4th entry on Doug Boling Blog :-)
  5. I would like TOC to be organized as a "book" as much as possible meaning that by reading articles in the order of TOC it should be possible to understand this technology, API or tool.
  6. I don’t like Tags. Tags are another approach to organize information but Tags are flat and I don’t like that. As an extra it’s ok but I need hierarchical TOC. TOC in "normal" products like Windows and MS Office is really bad too. MS Office TOC is terrible. It hasn’t always been so bad in the past but now one must use search to find answers. For that to work well Search algorithm must be really intelligent (i.e. possess statistics of user queries and clicks from billions of users like in Web Search engines). Online help is slow and seems to return same results as local help. If you need something non-trivial it won’t be in help because help is written for beginners. Advanced users are deprived of local help and have to google answers on Technet (because Live Search always resets itself back to Russian from En-US market on my PC and then produces completely irrelevant results). So, Help TOC is very important for me independently of my experience with the product.
  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2009
    Thank you for your comments, which are very helpful. I will pass them on to my management team for consideration and discussion. Paul