Going Organic

I was just sitting out here in the living room, thinking that while I was enjoying myself -- I'm sipping flavored water, reading Hard Rain, and listening to the soft piano music coming from the CD player -- I really should be doing some work. That's not as intensely work-oriented as it sounds, because the work that I want to be doing is something that I really want to do -- something that I'd do for free, in fact, which gives a pretty good indication of how much I want to do it. But as it turns out I can't do it right this minute because I don't have the access authority to update one of the libraries I need to put something into. There's a bit of irony there that I won't get into. But I thought well, okay then, I'll spend some time leafing through the manual for this product. Only there isn't one manual, there's several, perhaps dozens -- the people who wrote the manuals dumped everything they could think of (which is not the same as 'everything you need to know') into the manuals, and they littered the landscape with all sorts of helpful references, some of which you really should look at, and some of which are only useful if you've never done this kind of thing before. You could spend months reading this stuff.

I realized the other night that the thing that freaks me about these manuals is not so much their sheer mass as that they are a reference, not a guide. They would explain airport ticketing codes by starting with Bernoulli's Theorem; they would explain economics by starting with the concept of trade in ancient times. What I want out of this is a fast guide; tell me the minimum that I have to know, and which I can be presumed not to know, and let me go from there. If I hit a problem, I'll back up, try it again, and then if it doesn't work, I'll look at the reference. But don't give me all that detail up front.

Another thing that makes these manuals difficult to use is that they're in PDF format. Now I happen to think that PDF (Portable Document Format, which I believe was developed by Adobe) is a very cool operation. But its not intended for people who write big honkin manuals, because you can't easily navigate in them unless the developer of the document put in not only hyperlinking (which some do) but a trail so you can go backwards in your hyperjumps (which no body does; if any one wants it, I hereby offer the phrase 'breadcrumbing' to describe the things you do to make it possible to go back out the way you came in). So if you go one or two hyperlinks in, or worse yet, if you search a couple of times and go to specific spots, you completely lose the sense of where you are in the manual. This isn't a big deal (well, much of one) if you're reading a reference because references are segmented; no one worries about losing track of the Bs when they're in the encyclopedia's Q section. But a guide builds; it assumes in chapter Q that you've read the material in chapter B -- or at least that you know that its there if you need it. Hyperlinks destroy that . In a way, this is why programmers hate GOTO programming, and like Object Oriented programming. OOP is segmented.

So what's needed is for this product to have a guide that takes you merrily along at, say, one thousand feet -- enough detail so that you can get stuff done, not so much that you get swamped with the history of coinage in Carthage, not so little that you get just a general impression of Stuff. I don't know of anyone who can do this, at least with printed documentation. But I do know of some search engines that are trying to change the -- for lack of a better phrase -- linear paradigm that says 'start here, go to end' into something more organic, something that dips and swoops as your attention level and needs vary. Some even try to watch the way you search and deliver a 'searching experience' thats tailored to the way you search, in addition to what you're searching for. I think its an intruiging area, one I know very little about, though I do suspect -- only a gut feeling -- that a lot of work is to be done before it's ready for prime time. Or whatever the Tivo equivilent is.

Until that kind of organic search experience comes to market, we're pretty much stuck with PDF. (Sorry, Adobe.) And I'm stuck with this big honkin manual.