Design / Formatting Help Needed

Question

Good Afternoon,
I am in the process of developing a help system to support a
proprietary green screen application that we use in our
organization… the green screen application is very convoluted
and all steps/processes etc to be completed in the system have many
many steps to complete. In order to not overwhelm the end user, in
any given help topic there are multiple subtopics that are
“hidden” until the DHTML dropdown hot spot is
activated.
Within each hotspot, there are also “sub hot
spots”. However, this is confusing to the user… there
are so many hotspots etc (both hotspots from the main topic page
and “sub” hotspots within a hotspot) that the user is
losing track of where they are at.
I was wondering if anyone had an general design
recommendations or best practice recommendations that I should be
adhering to in order to eliminate this confusion.
Thanks!

Answer 1

I've used hotspots within hotspots without issues. I suggest
you break the information into smaller chunks if you can. If a
particular task is very long, consider making it a book instead of
a single topic. For example, if you assign one topic to each of
five tasks, but the third task involves six steps, turn the third
task into six steps/topics, and bind them as a book in your Help
file. So you'll go from this:
1. Task 1 (single topic)
2. Task 2 (single topic)
3. Task 3 (single topic)
4. Task 4 (single topic)
5. Task 5 (single topic)
To this:
1. Task 1 (single topic)
2. Task 2 (single topic)
3. Task 3 (one book with six topics)
4. Task 4 (single topic)
5. Task 5 (single topic)
This kind of solution should cut down on some of the
nesting.