QuickCards by Usability Sciences Corporation is a very targeted product that can provide a quick and simple solution for improving performance. With QuickCards you can create a series of procedural information “cards” that can be linked to any Windows application, including both standard and custom programs. A user can quickly view these cards by clicking on a small icon in the title bar of the application. This action will display the QuickCards table of contents. You can click on the name of a card to view it. The standard QuickCard is a small window with a yellow background.

The text in the QuickCard topic windows can include hotspots that display graphics, pop-up definitions, jumps to related topics, or open another application. The contents of the card can be easily “rolled-up” so that you can see the underlying application. I particularly like the scrolling feature. A click on the scroll button will scroll the text up one paragraph at a time, with a very smooth flow. Your eyes can easily re-adjust to the first line of the next paragraph, unlike some other hypertext systems where the text scrolls by so fast that it can take several seconds to find your location.

How to create a QuickCard

To develop QuickCards, you will need the QuickCards Development Kit. The Usability Sciences Corporation has done a exceptionally good job in creating a development program that is very easy to learn and use. It will likely take you less time to learn how to use the QuickCards Development Kit that it took to learn how to use your Internet browser. This means that non-technical staff can easily create QuickCards for the applications they use.

The QuickCard card editor looks exactly like the final product. Unlike other types of text editors the QuickCard topic editor is very structured. It is designed primarily for writing procedural information in a numbered or bulleted list format.

Creating QuickCard Hyperlinks

You can easily create three different types of hyperlinks, each with its own underline colour. A definition link displays a pop-up window, with a definition of the underlined word or phrase. You can easily attach the same definition to the same word that appears in several different topics. With the graphics link you can pop-up a “bmp” formatted graphic. The QuickCards Development Kit includes a screen capture program for creating bitmap images of your applications screens. You can add jump hyperlink that will display another QuickCard topic, a QuickCard table or contents or launch another application, such as a Windows help file.

Linking to an Application and Distributing

To link your QuickCards to an application, you simply open the application and click on the link button in the QuickCards Development Kit. The system will then display a list of the running applications. Pick your application and the link is made. Distributing your QuickCards is also a real breeze. The “Setup” wizard guides you through a few easy steps to create a setup disk.

The Usability Sciences Corporation produces QuickCards for many standard office applications, like Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite. You can add to or modify the content of these QuickCard with the QuickCards Development Kit.

QuickCards Documentation

The QuickCards Development Kit documentation includes some very good tips for writing procedural information. It also includes sample programming code that you can use to create context sensitive QuickCards for applications developed in Visual Basic, Lotus Notes. Delphi and other development environments.

Assessment

QuickCard's easy of use makes it an ideal product for quickly delivering useful procedural information both for the using a software application or even work that is performed outside the computer environment. The QuickCards Development Kit itself is a good example of user centered software design. QuickCards may not be as robust or flexible as the Windows Help system, but it will take you less time to learn how to write and distribute QuickCards.

You can download a copy of the QuickCards Development Kit form the Usability Sciences Corporation website.