Jerry, the content is not my responsibility, and I have been told that it will change only slightly from the current content.
I am the "Style" person to come up with ideas to make the content understandable to the health aids. But I will put forth the suggestion anyway - its really how the book is written, except that the trees are more complicated than one might expect. Thank you. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jerry Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "CF-Community" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 4:35 AM Subject: Re: Need help with weird project... > 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 > > ______________________________________________________________________ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
