Converting Documents to Hypertext

See how your customers actually use their document

I interview a cross-section of my document users before I decided how I would implement hypertext in their documents. This let me answer the following questions, so I could design hypertext into the documents that they would find useful:

• Do the customers read an entire section of your document at a time?
• Do they read a sequential portion each time they look at the document or do they jump around?
• If they jump around, is the jumping based on what they read in a previous section or is it unrelated?

Hypertext is a powerful tool. Just because it has all that power doesn't mean that your document has to be designed to use all its power. Start with a simple design and add features as you need to. A "cool" feature that you've seen in another hypertext document may end up being something your customers actually use, ignore, or find annoying. I found it was better to give my customer some simple hypertext features, see how they used the document once it was converted to hypertext, and then add additional features based on their requests and my observations.