Introduction	Audience	Limitations		Escaping Paper	Navigation Bar
Navigation Map	Virtual Includes	Audience-to-Author		Conclusion	Bibliography

Escaping the Confines of Paper:

There are some obvious advantages to delivering information over the web, rather than on paper. Successful design will make the most of these advantages. Foremost among these advantages are interactivity navigation, multiple pathways, and timely updates.

Web Pages are Interactive
The computer screen is a double edged sword. "Vigorous writing is concise" (Strunk, 1979 p. 23). This tenet long observed in paper documentation is doubly true on the web. Research shows that reading from a computer screen is about 25% slower than reading from paper. This means wed design requires text to be split up into more palatable chunks (Nielsen, 1999 p. 100-101). The solution to this problem is to build a navigation tool that allows the reader to easily jump from one discrete chunk of information to the next. The navigation tools within this site are an example of that. Navigation is available at the top and bottom of each page. This sort of redundancy of navigation capability is not possible on paper. Instead of leafing to the front or back of a paper document to find the appropriate page, the web audience can quickly scan and click to the appropriate section. When done successfully, navigation tools provide a level of user control that is simply not possible with paper documentation.

Multiple Pathways
Generally, cost and space constraints require the author to try to find the best way to provide the information, and this one format printed. However, "sometimes it is necessary to write two different documents to two people even though your message is the same" (Greene, 1993 p. 32) The web has no such constraints. Instead, web documentation can provide the same piece of information in multiple sections, tailored to that individuals expectations.

The operating hours and class schedules for the UMD ITSS computer labs are one example of this. One user might surf into the lab home page, see the key-word "schedules," and immediately follow that link. Mission accomplished. But, suppose another user is fixated on SBE 17, a particular lab. If that user begins with the SBE 17 lab in mind, they will find the schedule information for that particular lab in the appropriate section. See the ITSS Lab Home Page and follow the "schedules link" or the "interactive lab map" link to find schedule information in either are. "Site design must be aimed at simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with a very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools" (Nielsen, 1999 p. 164). Sometime that same piece of information might logically appear in different sections of a document. Using links and virtual includes, as well as well designed navigation tools, a web author can make the same information available in multiple areas. The constraints of space that limit paper documentation are not a factor here.

Timely Updates
The most powerful capability offered by the web medium is the ease of updating information. Take this site you are currently browsing, for example. I provided the URL to my graduate committee a week ago. Yet here I sit adding content. Web pages can be updated on the fly, easily, and transparently (for the user). Another example to illustrate this point, and one which is perhaps more defensible than my procrastination, is the class schedule in the labs. I provide this information to UMD students in two formats: paper printouts posted outside each lab on campus, and on the web. Cutting and pasting the information from the campus room scheduling program into a serviceable web format takes approximately 15 minutes. Printing, photocopying, and posting the paper versions takes about 2 hours, and reaches a far smaller audience.

In the example above, I can and do update the paper version. In the case of my "Student Computing Guides" I simply cannot do that. The guide is generally written in the summer, printed en masse to minimize printing costs, and mailed out or distributed to students. This means that time sensitive information simply cannot be included. The web then becomes an extension of the paper documentation. Each paper document list the URL for the lab home page, and time sensitive information, like class schedules, is posted there. The web medium provides advantages, both as an extension of paper and in lieu of paper, that are simply not feasible in the paper medium.