Popular Products: Usability

Popular software: Usability

Framemaker and Robohelp are a technical writer's tools of the trade. So when I was in a training program early this month (July) I noticed some minor usability problems with them.

Framemaker

When you open FM for the first time, you'd end up feeling 'why did I pay $700 for this!' The screen is bland, no default page, nothing. You are wrong though. It is by far the most powerful tool for print media. It has a steeper learning curve as compared to -say-Robohelp. And it has funny labels. The 'No Undo' label tickled me; on all tasks that don't support 'undo' there's a label that says 'No undo'. The idea is good, but I'd like to see an alert 'You can't undo this operation. Wanna continue?' And FM supports only ONE UNDO. I don't know why. My sweet darling MS-Word supports as many undos (since the last 'save'). I shouldn't be comparing these two products. I know. But to me they are but word processors. So I'd expect them to behave in a similar fashion. MSN and Yahoo messenger are different products but there is some consistency in the way they behave (or do they?). Both are Instant Messengers.

Robohelp

I love this one. It is a smart application (RoboHelp Office) that integrates with MS-Word. Now, that's brilliant. So there's no big learning curve here. You get on it and you're on your way in no time. But then again, when asking me to choose a number between zero and a zillion it shouldn't give me an error when I say give 1.5! Or at least tell me any 'whole number' between zero and a zillion. Minor screw-up and I can live with it. If you want to create online help or MSDN library type sites, you may want to give this guy a spin. A 15 day demo is available on their website 'ehelp'

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