Well, the coding/planning part of the work is over, and now I'm onto the big cycle of documentation.
It took a couple of weeks to really get going on the project: the first week was spent doing research into the capabilities of the Creative Suite, and the next was spent exploring the variety of ideas I'd had. Most of them, sadly, ended up being junked as being a bit too complicated for non-technical folks to follow (the designs really did have to be idiot-proof: we'd previously sent PDF proofs to people who still had trouble signing into Windows!), but finally I had a set of ideas that (a) worked, (b) saved a lot of time and (c) don't crash unless the user is really, really trying. So I'm happy.
Sadly, there wasn't enough time to be able to set up an proper intranet for them, which I still think would have been quite handy; I'm doing the documentation as a small model of an intranet though, just to demonstrate the ideas behind it. You never know: I might get a call-back!
My plan is try to make the documentation sufficiently interlinked that it's never too hard to find the walkthrough that you're looking for: to write lots of small chapters, with plenty of links between them, and to reuse the same chapter structure wherever possible. (Lazy - or consistent? A bit of both, perhaps.)
It was a great couple of weeks spent in London, though, and a great little bit of work to be getting on with to get me back into the swing of things. I didn't manage to write any Java that week, but at least the old grey matter was getting a bit of exercise nonetheless.
Next up: finish this darned documentation, and then start writing my applets!
No comments:
Post a Comment