We recognized that unless the online documents were highly usable, Silicon Graphics' customers would refuse to give up printed documents and there would be little cost savings. Silicon Graphics was about to launch the Indigo workstation, a low-end (for Silicon Graphics) computer that has since substantially enlarged its customer base. We knew that this customer mix has much higher expectations for documentation and ease of use than the engineering and scientific users who comprise the high-end graphics computing market that Silicon Graphics had long dominated. Silicon Graphics couldn't afford an online documentation system that generated more customer support calls than it prevented.
An additional factor that motivated the IRIS InSight project was competitive pressure from other workstation vendors. Other vendors were already providing online documentation, and this was beginning to show up in product comparisons, where Silicon Graphics computers consistently rated outstanding on all factors except documentation. We turned being last into an advantage by conducting a careful competitive analysis and resolving to "leapfrog" the competition with an aggressive online documentation project that provided new capabilities to users.
Several organizations at Silicon Graphics were considering online documentation, and it was essential for us to focus these disparate efforts into a single company-wide initiative. It was not difficult to convince the managers of projects for whom online documentation was a third or fourth priority to defer to a project for which it was the primary focus, but this consensus- building and consolidation took several months.
In early 1991 we conducted a survey of Silicon Graphics developers and customers to ask about their plans and requirements for online document delivery. The results clearly spelled out four requirements for Silicon Graphics' effort:
These results seemed somewhat surprising at first. Many people at Silicon Graphics expected that developers would want a system that competitively exploited Silicon Graphics' superior digital media technology. However, since many companies that develop applications for Silicon Graphics computers also develop for other Unix computers and the Macintosh, they needed an online documentation approach that would not be limited to Silicon Graphics' line. Developers wanted to be able to create a single set of documents that could be viewed on all of the computers on which they sold software. IRIS InSight would obviously have to be standards-based. But which standards?
We spent several months studying the technical and business issues and the IRIS InSight engineering team demonstrated that either Postscript or RTF would satisfy Silicon Graphics' requirements for delivering online documentation. But what finally led us to choose SGML was our competitive analysis of the online documentation offerings of other workstation vendors and the survey of Silicon Graphics developers. Only SGML would enable the shift from a vendor-centered "here's our online documentation" strategy to a customer-centered "here's an online documentation viewer that you can also use" strategy. The positive response from the Silicon Graphics developer and customer base confirms that we made a good decision.
Once we chose SGML and began our system design, we had the luxury of several "build vs. buy" decisions. Because SGML is a vendor-independent standard, many companies are building SGML- based products to support various parts of the SGML publishing process. We decided that it would let us ship a product faster and it would be less proprietary if we relied in part on third- party tools. We chose FastTag from Avalanche Development for format translation and the DynaText toolkit from Electronic Book Technologies of Providence, Rhode Island to satisfy some of our indexing and presentation requirements. Both are technology leaders in their respective niches.
IRIS InSight takes advantage of the unique digital media capabilities to present video, audio, 3-D graphics, and animation on Silicon Graphics computers, but multi-platform developers can use the basic DynaText viewer to deliver some of this information on other platforms with no changes to the object files. Without DynaText, we would be unable to meet the cross-platform requirement we identified in the 1991 survey of Silicon Graphics developers.
One initial design goal was to maintain fidelity of content between the printed manuals and those we delivered online. By this we mean that we would not require page fidelity, an exact correspondence between online and printed versions in page numbering, layout, or formatting, but the structural organization would be the same [6]. The first version of IRIS InSight that we started shipping in late 1992 more or less met this goal.
But as we have moved more books into IRIS InSight, we have come to recognize that content fidelity is not entirely achievable, nor should it be. We have discovered some structural or logical aspects of our printed books that we cannot preserve in the online versions. For example, we have no easy way other than screen snaps to duplicate printed graphics that have text callouts or the sidenotes that appear in many of our end-user books.
On the other hand, once a critical mass of information entered IRIS InSight, users started to rely on the online version as the primary one, so complete content fidelity would limit us from enhancing the online books where it added value. We increased the descriptiveness and number of internal headings in books because of the effective use that the IRIS InSight structure view makes of them [6]. We have begun to incorporate 3-D graphics, animation, audio, and video into IRIS InSight books. We expect that future releases of IRIS InSight will lead us further from any correspondence with paper documents.
The detailed design of IRIS InSight emerged over time as a result of a thorough review of the literature, a detailed analysis of design alternatives, and extensive usability testing. (We highly recommend [8, 9, 11]). We recognized early that acceptance of IRIS InSight depended on users being willing to rely on online documents as their primary version.
Researchers from the customer research and usability organization at Silicon Graphics conducted three usability studies with both experienced Silicon Graphics customers and Silicon Graphics novices. The studies were designed to ensure that IRIS InSight would be preferred by users and that it wouldn't generate calls to customer support. These studies contrasted several specific design alternatives and objectively measured performance on information retrieval and problem solving tasks. The most important of these were the "granularity" or "node size" into which online books should be organized and the appropriate behavior of hypertext links; e.g., whether to scroll within the same window or open a second window.
These carefully-controlled experiments led to the final IRIS InSight design in which books were the most salient online unit and in which each distinctive link type has a unique behavior. User performance with the final IRIS InSight design was equal to that for the printed manuals, a significant achievement given the limited experience users had with IRIS InSight. Finally, users strongly preferred IRIS InSight to the printed manuals.
We gradually recognized that SGML was having a profound institutional impact at Silicon Graphics and was qualitatively changing the publications process. We were imposing significant new responsibilities on technical publications personnel.
SGML changes the relative importance of formatting and structure. When authors are charged with delivering camera-ready copy, they are tempted to insert formatting tags until the document looks just right. A new requirement to deliver valid SGML files directs an author's attention to more precise structural tagging that gives customers the advantages of online presentation but which requires more work . Authors do value the flexibility provided by the multimedia capabilities of IRIS InSight, but only if they are given the time to take advantage of them.
We chose an incremental strategy for moving to SGML that attempted to minimize the disruption to existing methods and technology. Because Silicon Graphics had just made a major investment in technology and training to standardize technical publications on FrameMaker, we knew we had to design a publications process based on format translation to SGML from FrameMaker rather than adopt SGML-based authoring technology directly. This strategy also preserved Silicon Graphics' investment in using FrameMaker to create hardcopy documents.
We brought in outside consultants to conduct document analyses to help us standardize our use of FrameMaker. This was a critical step, because authoring standards are essential if automated translation to SGML were to work. We discovered that although different writing groups at Silicon Graphics had their own templates, we were able to extract a common document architecture and encode that in a single document type definition (DTD).
The DTD is the linchpin of an SGML application because it formally defines the structure of a valid document instance. It establishes the target for format translation and is the basis for the alternative presentation styles in the IRIS InSight viewer. But what authors see most directly are the templates in FrameMaker, and any changes to these templates ripple into the DTD and the software for format translation and online presentation.
At the time we didn't fully appreciate this central importance and vulnerability of the DTD in the overall publications process. For months several people on the IRIS InSight team worked on different pieces of the end-to-end process, and a change that might be an improvement in authoring templates or other parts viewed in isolation would be a destabilizing bug to other pieces. It took several months for us to stabilize the production process.
Training and re-training of authors and production personnel has been essential. Initially our authors attended courses taught by popular industry consultants. But as Silicon Graphics has learned more about SGML and online documentation, there has been a major shift in training to very specific "here's how we do it at Silicon Graphics". Our needs can no longer be met by the broad and relatively unspecific training available from outsiders. Instead, Silicon Graphics authors have translated what they learned into Silicon Graphics-speak and it now exists as a detailed publications style guide as an IRIS InSight book. This book enables authors to become SGML and IRIS InSight-aware even if their books are not going online right away. Authors and production personnel have also instituted one-on-one and group training in which they teach each other how to write for online and how to build books successfully.
The production process still needs to be more transparent for authors. Passage Systems and Silicon Graphics are currently working on tools for authors and production personnel that will hide much of the complexity of SGML, especially the nuances of the format translation and indexing tools.
We believe it was critical to the success of IRIS InSight that we focused on issues of putting text online before we moved to incorporate digital media into IRIS InSight books. It was difficult at times to maintain this conservative tack, since Silicon Graphics computers are unsurpassed in their capabilities for incorporating audio, video, animation, and 3-D graphics. Nevertheless, we had seen other online documentation efforts fail because they were seduced by the excitement and hype about multimedia, leading to books with "Macbeth multimedia" -- full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing (our apologies to Shakespeare) [5]. We knew that IRIS InSight would never be scaleable, cost-effective, or usable by our authors or customers if we relied on hand-crafted production techniques of the sort encouraged by premature experimentation with multimedia [1, 6].
Now that we have a robust process for converting print-based books to IRIS InSight, we can confidently provide the FrameMaker templates, the DTD, and the associated format translation and production software to those wanting to use IRIS InSight to become online publishers on their own. Since IRIS InSight text files are completely compatible with those used by DynaText on other Unix platforms, the Macintosh, or under Microsoft Windows, a multi-platform strategy for online documentation is completely viable. IRIS InSight can use any SGML DTD, so users remain free to choose another document architecture if they need one for a specialized application. However, by providing a core of SGML technology tailored for IRIS InSight, Silicon Graphics and Passage Systems have greatly reduced both the cost and the risk of adopting SGML.