Tutorial Index Rethink (9th March 2008)
Back in May 2007 I realigned the index of tutorials for GTA for compactness. This seemed like a good idea at the time. The result was a blob of links for a selection of tutorials and another to all the categories. Impossible to scan through or locate to a specific tutorial.
Compactness versus Comprehension
Scrolling is easier than navigating between pages, so now:
- Categories are not mentioned:
- They reflect my mental model, not necessarily the user’s.
- Every tutorial is available from a single click.
- Every tutorial is linked to, directly, with a description.
- Each tutorial has a row to itself.
- Tutorials are grouped by edition, subgrouped by category and ordered alphabetically.
- Links and descriptions are aligned within each edition.
- Each edition has its own section and heading
- Editions are ordered from newest to oldest.
More scrolling, definitely. But now:
- Any tutorial is available from a single click.
- Good for simplicity. Users can scan read one page to find any tutorial.
- A single page lets Find in Page speed up the process.
- A description next to each link tells users what they’ll get.
The same changes have been applied to edition index pages.
Copy Editing
Descriptions were often rather long and fluffy, so I’ve written them again. The steps I went through for one of them:
-
An article about why making new cars to the correct dimensions is important.
-
An article about whymaking new cars to the correct dimensions is important. -
Making new cars
tothe correctdimensionssize is important. -
Making new cars the correct size
is importantaffects their performance. -
Making new cars the correct size affects their performance.
It now summarises what the article describes in 59 characters. Microcontent ftw.