Re: Evaluation results: Navigation

My comments = CC::, Wendy's comments = WC::

>WC::
>Did participants not make use of the Checklist of Checkpoints? The
>checklist is organized by topic and points back to the Guidelines
>document.

CC::
Very few of the participants were observed to use the Checklist. Only one
participant methodically worked through it. They commented that they would
have liked it to be presented before the Guidelines, so that the Checklist
pointed _to_ the Guidelines, rather than _back_ to them, so that the author
would get more detail as they moved from Checklist to Guidelines to
Techniques.

The Checklist seems to be a document that is intended to be used after an
author has read the Guidelines, rather than as an aid to navigation.

Is the concern that if the Table of Contents contains HTML topics that
authors might only read the section of the Guidelines that applies to the
element(s) they are working with and not read the more general sections?
This was certainly the way in which many of the participants were observed
to behave, and many did miss important information. However, they were
frustrated at not being able to quickly find the sections which cover
elements such as forms and frames.

>WC::
>All of the URLs between the Guidelines doc, the Techniques doc and the
>checklist of checkpoints are relative, thus they should be no longer than
>a few words (this was a change that may not have been in effect in the
>version that participants used).

CC::
The URL was percieved to be too complex.  As with many URLs there are
several directories and hyphens, particularly in the relative URLs.  This
made it difficult to easily identify the document and section to which the
link went.  There may be no way around this, but I thought it was important
to highlight the problem.

>WC::
>hmmm. New section numbering is an interesting idea. Unfortunately, since
>the Techniques document and the Guidelines document are organized
>differently (Guidelines by issue, Techniques by issues then HTML topics) i
>don't think we will be able to synch them up as suggested.

CC::
I see the problem with matching the section numbers across documents.  But
do you think G1-x and T1-x might work?  I think the main problem is with
knowing which document is currently being viewed and re-labelling the
sections could help.

Regards,

Chetz

Received on Tuesday, 16 March 1999 05:36:00 UTC