Are TOCs required in a “Search Centric” World?

Let me put my cards on the table here. I am a man of a certain age with many years experience in using and producing help files. I hark back fondly to the days when a Table of Contents was the only means of navigating. All my documentation has a Table of Contents and I insisted that a specific set of rules be included in our Style Guide on the subject. All of this aside, time marches ever onwards and I believe it is right for you to have your say on the matter.

This post was inspired by a twitter poll run by RJ Jacquez, Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist, which asked whether we see a TOC as being a required element of a help file. There is no doubt that younger, more technical users interact with help files in a different way than I did when I was their age. Technology has advanced and searching offers many user benefits that simply were not available years ago. Demands on our time mean we want a quick and easy method of finding what we want. But to answer the question of whether a TOC is required, we need to address the following questions:

1. Is a search facility the only method a user needs to find content?
2. Does a search give the user 100% of the required information?
3. If it doesn’t, how do they find the rest?

The answer to the first question is, “It depends.” The mantra of any technical communicator is, “Know your audience.” If they don’t want a TOC, never use one and are paying for you to deliver the end product, you pretty much have your answer right there. However it should also be part of our role to educate our users where required. Part of that is should be extolling the advantages of the TOC (and Index for that matter) and how it can be used. This leads me nicely onto the second question.

So you want to find out how to do something, you open the search tab and type in a question. As if by magic, a long list of results is returned. Problem solved! Or is it? Which result do you look at? Does the result at the top of the list provide the required information? Do you have sufficient information visible to make a judgment? All of these questions highlight everything that is wrong with search functionality. By its nature it is subjective. Each search tool’s algorithm works in a particular way and there is nothing you can do to change it. Perhaps you can include keywords in your content that will be picked up, but that’s about it. It is just the nature of the beast that you have little control over what it returns.

So you have a list of 10 topics to choose from with only a limited amount of information available to enable you to make the right decision. You click a link and read the content. As luck would have it, it provides you with the answer and away you go. Trouble is, five minutes later you get stuck again further down the process and have to repeat the process all over again. If only there was a means of identifying where you were inside the help file’s structure. Then you could look inside that part of it and see if there was something more likely to meet your needs. What? There’s no TOC? Expletives deleted!