Having done a _ton_ of these in my past lives, my first question is:
Are you thinking about reorganizing the content, or are you just looking for style
ideas and/or ideas to create a decent cognitive map.
If reorganizing the content is an option, and the purpose is to walk a relatively
ignorant user through all the possibilities to get to A SINGLE ANSWER, I might
organize the content with a dichotomous key. And pull the patient ed stuff out
separately (on individual pages that can easily be photocopied and sent home with the
patient.)
That is basically breaking the content into an ever-deepening tree, usually with only
two branching options (although a multi-case is sometimes helpful.)
For example,
Are there signs of severe allergic reaction (shortness of breath...)
Yes - Go to EMERGENCY, Severe Shortness of Breath, p. 70
No - Did it start as an:
insect bite - Go to SKIN-10: Insect Bites, Stings
Injury - Go to SKIN-14: ...
Just an idea.
Jerry Johnson
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07/24/02 08:38PM >>>
I have been asked to work on a project that is a little out of my realm of skills and
which is a little odd. I could use your help.
In rural Alaska sometimes people live in villages where the nearest doctor or nurse is
hundreds of miles away, accessable on via plane or maybe boat. In these villages
there is a health care practicioner called a Community Health Aid. They have
Emergency Trauma Tech training and are trained in basic health care skills and are
supervised by doctors in larger cities in Alaska via telephone. In order to give such
an inexperienced person the ability to do the job needed, a manual was created which
is bascially a step by step instruction book for the Health Aids to follow.
The project is to rewrite this manual so that it works better. The reason I was
chosen to be on the committee is because they need some technical expertise on working
together from around the state, and because I opened up my fat mouth and pointed out
all kinds of things wrong with the current book layout. In the future this book will
be a web app but thats another story.
Opening up my fat mouth has given me a task to complete before friday. It is this
task which I come to you with. Many of you have some editing and content backgrounds,
some of you are artistic and most of you are creative. I think you might be able to
come up with an idea I hadn't thought of.
The task is to figure out a good, sensible layout for the text of the book. Basically
its kind of a technical manual for medicine - there are tasks, to be done in order,
questions to ask, based on the type of problem. The current layout is bad - its hard
to find the "problem" headers on the page because they are the same size and font as
the subtitles below them. The questions that the health aid is supposed to ask aren't
indicated any differently than an action or a decision tree. They don't want anything
to really change the way the health aids work (i.e I cant' do flow charts etc) but
they would like the instructions to be more clear. Currently the text is just sort of
stupidly bulleted by hierarchy and indented by hierarchy, but there is no indicator as
to WHAT the text is
(action, question, decision, link to other text) - perhaps a bullet indicates action
and heirarchy is the indent... or font indicates action? Ah, well, its up to you.
Color can be used. It should be far more usable than slick.
So if anyone has the time to bother taking a look and giving a sample of what they
think would be workable. A link to a chapter of the document is below. I promise to
give you full credit with the committee, but its for free. And its kind of cool -
your idea will be in many rural clinics in alaska if they use it.
I thank you in advance for any ideas you have to offer.
http://www.bad-dawgs-in-ak.com/skin.doc
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