Practical Magic:
Issues In Browse Sequence Design and Creation

By NEIL PERLIN
Boston Chapter

Most of the navigation features in online help or documentation are random-access. The table of contents, index, search, links, and so forth, all let you move from any topic to any other topic. But there may be times when you want to move from topic to topic sequentially, like moving from page to page sequentially in a book. This sequential movement is provided by the browse sequences.

Today’s help authoring tools have largely automated the process of creating browse sequences - the assignment of sequential IDs to the topics in a sequence and the addition of a way for users to then go from topic 1 to topic 2 to topic 3.... Browse sequence creation has become so simple that development is no longer even an issue; the real issues are on the design side.

Browse sequences have been around since the mid-80s, time enough for the design questions to have been ironed out long ago. But, despite this history and apparent simplicity, their design and implementation can be surprisingly complex. In this column, I’ll look at three major issues:

• When to use browse sequences.
• Types of browse sequences.
• Interface issues when using the browse sequence features in RoboHelp HTML.

I’ll also explain a little-known trick for automatically creating full-length browse sequences using RoboHelp HTML’s browse sequence editor.

When to Use Browse Sequences

A good rule of thumb is that you may want to create browse sequences for online documentation but should almost never create them for online help. Why?

• Online documentation, which can be anything from an HR manual to a tourist guide to Idaho, might be read sequentially. If the material you’re creating might be, then you can add the browse sequence feature.
  
  
• Online help, which assists users with a field or dialog box, is almost never read sequentially. Few users ever read a help topic and then decide to browse forward and read the next topic. Instead, users read the topic that provides the information they need and then return to the application. In this case, creating a browse sequence is a waste of your development time and a waste of screen space.

Types of Browse Sequences

You can create two types of browse sequences - sectional and full-length.

Sectional

In sectional browse sequences, users can move within specific groups of topics but can’t move between different groups.

For example, think of each chapter in a book as a specific group of topics, or section. Users can browse from the first page of chapter 1 to the last page of chapter 1, but cannot browse from the last page of chapter 1 to the first page of chapter 2 since the two chapters are separate sections that can’t be traversed by browsing. Users who want to advance from the last page of chapter 1 to the first page of chapter 2 must do so some other way, such as by selecting the first page of chapter 2 from the table of contents or, if the material is online, by finding a jump link in the last topic of chapter 1 that connects to the first topic of chapter 2.

Initially, this model makes sense; material in different sections may be so different that users are unlikely to move directly from one section to the next. For example, the material in a chapter on installing software may be so different from the material in the next chapter, the interface guide, that users won’t advance from the last step in installation to the first description of the interface. Right?

But what if users do want to advance from the last topic in the installation instructions to the first topic that describes the interface? They can’t if those topics are in separate browse sequences. Users will have to find some way to get to the first interface topic. The problem is that users may have gotten accustomed to browsing from topic to topic in the installation section, like turning pages in a book, and suddenly find that they can’t browse to the next topic, as if the last page of chapter 1 is glued down, and can’t be turned in order to reach the first page of chapter 2.

The use of sectional browse sequences assumes that users will understand the material’s design logic - different types of material in different topics, grouped in sections that are so different that there’s no direct movement between those sections. Instead, users may just think something broke... “I’ve been advancing forward topic-by-topic and all of a sudden I can’t anymore.”

Full-Length

In full-length browse sequences, users can start at the first topic in the online material and browse to the last topic, or start at a topic in the middle and browse back to the first or forward to the last. In other words, it’s like a book. The “topic-turning” idea is similar to the page-turning idea that people know from books, which means users don’t have to learn some new concept.

The full-length approach is so much easier for users to understand that I recommend using it as the standard approach for browse sequences except under very unusual conditions.

Interface Concerns

If you decide to create browse sequences in RoboHelp, consider two possible interface problems.

Visibility

In many cases, users may not notice the browse buttons, or notice them without realizing what they are. For example, where are the browse buttons in figure 1?

Figure 1 - First Browse Button Example

They’re on the left side of the screen, below the blue “Contents” button. What about in figure 2?

Figure 2 - Second Browse Button Example

They’re on the right side of the screen, just above the topic title “Kenya”.

Would your users have found them? And if you have novice users, would they even realize what these buttons did? Would they try an unlabelled button?

Confusing Button Duplication

EHelp’s proprietary implementation of browse buttons for HTML Help tries to solve the problems described above by making the buttons stand out more, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - eHelp’s Proprietary Browse Buttons

However, this implementation has a problem that can confuse users so much that they won’t use the feature. The problem is the apparent duplication between the Back and Forward buttons on the HTML Help toolbar and the Previous and Next buttons below the Options button on the HTML Help toolbar. It’s easy to think that the two sets of buttons do similar things; Back and Previous sound synonymous, as do Forward and Next. Unfortunately, they do very different things.

Back and Forward take you back to the previous topic or ahead to the next, even if the topics are not in sequence. For example, if you start in topic 50, jump to topic 200, jump to topic 201, and then click Back, you’ll go to topic 200. Click it again and you’ll go to topic 50.

Previous and Next take you to the previous or next topic in a browse sequence. If you’re on topic 100 of a four-topic browse sequence, clicking Next takes you to topic 200, then 300, then 400.

Users who don’t understand the difference will get confusing results. For example, assume you start on topic 50, jump to topic 200, jump to topic 201, then click the Back button. You’ll wind up back in 200. Now, you click Next to see 201 again but, because 200 is in a browse sequence, you go to 300 instead of 201. You then click Previous to return to your starting point and indeed go to 200. Now, you click Previous again and wind up not in 50, which was where you wanted to go, but in 100, the previous topic in the browse sequence. If this sounds confusing to you, think how confusing it could be to your users. If you’re creating HTML Help with RoboHelp HTML and want to use eHelp’s proprietary browse feature, consider adding a topic with a title like “How To Use This Help System” at the top of the table of contents.

So what’s the solution to these problems?

• If you plan to create WebHelp and use custom browse buttons, you may have to train users about them or add a topic with a title like “How To Use This Help System”.
  
  
• If you plan to create HTML Help and use eHelp’s browse buttons, there are three options.
  • Train your users.
  • Add a topic with a title like “How To Use This Help System”.
  • Turn off the Back and Forward buttons on the toolbar.

(Note - if you plan to use eHelp’s proprietary browse feature, you need to register an eHelp DLL called HHActiveX.DLL in order to run it. However, a recent change in a Microsoft DLL called ComCat.DLL may give you an “Unable to Register HHActiveX.DLL” error when you try to install HHActiveX.DLL. If this happens, see article 2650 in the eHelp Knowledge Base. (My thanks to Neil Haller for mentioning this problem.)

A RoboHelp HTML Trick

A drawback of this utility is the fact that it creates sectional browse sequences instead of one full-length sequence. But there’s a trick that lets you automatically create a full-length sequence that matches the topic sequence on the table of contents. Click the Auto-create Using TOC button on the Browse Sequence Editor dialog box and, when asked for the level of head to use to create the sections, enter 0. RoboHelp will create one browse sequence section entitled Untitled. When you expand this section, you’ll see every topic in the order in which it appears on the table of contents. You can then rename the section from Untitled to something more meaningful, and you’re done.

Summary