Thursday, November 29, 2007

Room for improvement

Today at work I spent most of the day reading documentation from Microsoft's MSDN web site. I am displeased with the experience for a few reasons:
  • AJAX has been around for a few years now, and I still need a full page refresh every time I click a link? It makes it impossible to keep track of the table of contents on the left side.
  • Broken links. Broken links are the bane of any website. It's just plain unprofessional. It would also be nice to know if a link was broken intentionally (as in the case of bad documentation) or unintentionally.
  • Bizarre URL naming conventions. The document entitled "Mixed (Native and Managed) Assemblies" is available at msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x0w2664k(VS.80).aspx. I'd prefer something like: ..,/library/vs2005/vc++/guide/interoperability/mixedassemblies.html (Don't click on this, cuz it don't work).
  • Too much information and a poor choice of fonts. As you can see below, the size of the font is too small for comfortable reading. The chapter and contents display is almost always going to be truncated.
  • Poor search. None of the problems listed thus far would be an issue if the search functionality was better.
Lest you think I'm only an engineer on the complain train, over the next few days I'm going to try and put a few sample screenshots of what I think a heavyweight software documentation site should look like. If I don't get too busy.

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