Defenestrating Tables & Indices

Is it time to stop cre­at­ing those page-wasting Table of Con­tents and Indices in a world where manu­als are no longer being printed?

Out of the win­dow, via Flickr user: Squirmelia

We deliver all of our doc­u­ment­a­tion as PDFs to our cus­tom­ers (except for that rare mar­ket­ing col­lat­er­als that get prin­ted and dis­trib­uted). These PDFs are uploaded to a repos­it­ory and made avail­able to cus­tom­ers (external and internal). Hav­ing observed how people use our doc­u­ment­a­tion these past few years, I noticed that only a few people actu­ally ‘glance’ at the Table of Con­tents. Every­one seems to like the Search but­ton in Acrobat Reader. Just fire a few keywords and Presto!, here are the results.

All that time and effort I spent in devel­op­ing that ToC and Index was down the pro­ver­bial drain as they never saw the user’s eyes. Not that you can blame them for not look­ing at my lov­ingly craf­ted ToC. Inform­a­tion seek­ing has moved away from get­ting to know the struc­ture of a guide from the ToC or nar­row­ing down a select­ive topic from the Index is no longer the right way to do things. It has evolved to the search box. PDFs are great for search­ing and you can even search mul­tiple PDFs simultaneously.

In a world when doc­u­ment­a­tion was prin­ted and delivered to cus­tom­ers as prin­ted books, the Table of Con­tents and the Index made sense as you can ‘run’ a search on a prin­ted book. But do they still make sense in an elec­tronic world where doc­u­ments are cre­ated as search­able PDFs?

Is it time to elim­in­ate tables and indices from the doc­u­ment­a­tion deliv­er­ables, espe­cially when they are not being printed?