The Design of an Online Help Facility for ExSpect

Designing an online help facility is diierent from writing a paper manual. The design principles for online documentation diier from those for written documentation, although often the same people are responsible for both tasks. In this paper we shortly discuss general principles and guidelines for the design of online documentation and we illustrate them by evaluating the design of an online help facility for ExSpect, a software tool for writing executable speciications. 1 Design of Online Documentation Designing online documentation for software products is quite diierent from writing a paper manual. While the writing of paper technical documentation is extensively studied and the resulting guidelines and principles have been tested in practice frequently, similar results are lacking for the design of online documentation. Only recently general theoretical results emerged and can be veriied in practice. In this paper rst some general guidelines and principles are presented. Subsequently, the actual design and implementation of an online help facility for the ExSpect software environment are considered in detail. The use of a software product generally requires a certain amount of user knowledge concerning that product. The user must know for example what buttons to press or what options to use in order to have the software product do what he or she wants it to do. This information about the use of the software product is called its documentation. The documentation speciies for all kinds of users, end-users and developers, how they can use the product .