Design Specifications and Guidelines - User Assistance
Conceptual Help provides background information, feature overviews, or processes. It provides "what" or "why" information beyond that needed to complete a task. Background information may describe a specific concept or feature, such as security, or how information is stored on your computer, and include links to one or two procedures.
A process overview may describe several separate procedures that are required in order to complete the process. For example, an overview about sending an e-mail message could describe several tasks: opening a new message window, specifying who to send the message to, composing and formatting the message, and then sending the message. The overview might describe each of these tasks and provide links to procedural topics for each task.
A feature overview may highlight features and provide links to tasks associated with using each feature. For example, you might describe accessibility features in the product, and then provide links to topics for setting each specific feature.
Because these topics provide much greater detail than a procedural topic, you may have more text than will fit in the topic window. Longer topics are typically organized under subheadings. A process or feature overview may be organized by bullets with links to related tasks at the end of each bullet.
Include all conceptual Help topics in the index, and include them in the table of contents where appropriate. The top level of the table of contents usually contains one or two conceptual topics, such as a product overview or a getting-started topic. When users read the table of contents, they are generally looking for help on accomplishing tasks. For this reason, any conceptual topics included in a table of contents generally follow the tasks. Most tasks provide Related Topics links to overview topics, if they exist.
Fundamentals of Designing User Interaction
Design Specifications and Guidelines