Building training scenarios with DITA

["France Baril" <France.Baril@ixiasoft.com>]

When we create a reference guide, we can split it into small user tasks: search for something, save something, join two things. Then users might need to do some of them in a specific order to get larger user tasks done.

 

This is an example from a case we worked on with the Cedrom-SNi team, where users may use a web interface to search for news articles from 350+ publications. This tool allows users to save their queries in order to reuse them later. It also allows users to create folders and attach the search queries to these folders. Doing so means that every time a new article is published that meets their criteria, it is dropped into the folder... and may or may not generate alerts to users who share access to the folder.

 

Typically training uses a case where users must perform a metatask: Set the system for news monitoring activities and shared the results with collegues who may or may not need to be alerted when the news comes out. For example, this activity could be performed somewhat like this:

 

    1. Search with simple criteria

    2. Make their search more precise

    3. Save the search under 'name X'.

    4. Attach it to a folder 'name Y' that they created previously

    5. Shared the folder 'name Y' with all users.

    6. Set alerts for user groups A and B only

    7. Create a second search 'name Z' and...

    8. Attach it to the same folder 'name Y' (attach query to folder comes back a second time!!!).

 

Then, we fake that they receive too many documents, so we ask them to:

 

    9.  Open the search 'name X', 

    10. Add more criteria to make the search more specific.

    11. Save the modified search (save operation comes back a second time!!!). 

 

Tasks are reused many times during a single scenario and 'linear tutorial information' is added, as you can see from the previous example, the tutorial info implies giving specific names to some queries in folder so that they can be found for other operations.

 

Here is a ppt I use to explain how we used DITA, and extended it to meet our needs.

 

Some issues that are not clear in the ppt:

 

    * Users in a leanring environment need less context information because the scenario provides that context.

    * We never translated that because it is customized for each client that only works in one locally. Localization of this would not be feasible, because we split up sentences that might just be reversed in another language.

    * Overhead was only worth it because of extreme customization and the fact that we don't reuse the tutorials for other clients and therefore don't need to maintain them every time a topic changes. Although we can reuse the process now for other projects with smaller overhead.

    * It is a challenge to make it look like it flows, and not like the stuff has been re-used from a reference guide.

 

I hope this can bring up a new dimension to our discussions,

 

France

 

P.S. The example is in French because we ever localized it. I can explain it further at the next meeting, if need be.

 

 

DITAandTutorialScenarios.ppt