• If the material is background only a beginner would want, and beginners represent only a small fraction of your audience, move the material to another page, and link to it.
• If the material supplies the nitty-gritty details behind your generalizations, but some people might not want the details, move them to another page, and link to it.
• If your product is complex, break up the information, and offer links to the major chunks. (These may be on other pages, or they could be far below on a gigantic scrolling page, if your design allows such things).
• Create a sidebar with links to related stories, even if they are off site. Often these stories back you up, or expand on a detail you have mentioned.
• If information is just not needed here, move it or cut it.
• Keep asking yourself: Is this item relevant to the topic? If it is, retain it here. If it is of secondary relevance, remove it to another page, and link to it.

Often you can’t predict how knowledgeable your audience will be of your subject matter. Provide links to information that can help a less knowledgeable person bring themselves up to the level of your presentation. If your product is complex enough that you cannot provide all the information someone needs in one presentation (and most of ours are that complex), make it easy for them to get more information.
—Levine(1997).

Sidebars with summaries in the same place on similar pages help the readers know whether or not they want to read the rest of the page. —Bricklin (1998).

Unnecessary information … prevented users from finding what they were looking for even if it was right in front of them. —Rajani & Rosenberg (1999).

Readers comprehend better and retain more information when they are interested in the topic of the passage (Asher 1980; Stevens 1980; Baldwin, Peleg-Bruckner, and McClintock 1985). Further, the more relevant readers find content to be, the more they focus their attention and comprehension processes (Celsi and Olson 1989).—Spyridakis(2000)

See bibliography: Bricklin (1998), Horton (1990), Levine (1997), Morkes & Nielsen (1997b), Rajani & Rosenberg (1999), Slatin (1988), Spyridakis (2000).

Another benefit of TAPI is that it accommodates multiple applications on a single phone line. (The Telephone Application Programming Interface or TAPI is the standard proposed by Microsoft for making the computer work as a telephone.) TAPI lets several applications use the same phone line, so one can be waiting to receive a call while another places one. So you can leave a Fax program running, waiting for a fax you know is coming, while using Dial-Up Networking to pick up your email. In the past you had to cancel the first program, to free up the modem, before you could launch a second program using the modem. With TAPI, the Fax program simply recedes into the background, like background printing.

Another benefit of TAPI is that it accommodates multiple applications on a single phone line.

POPUP:

The Telephone Application Programming Interface (TAPI) is the standard proposed by Microsoft for making the computer work as a telephone.

LINK TO ANOTHER WINDOW:

TAPI lets several applications use the same phone line, so one can be waiting to receive a call while another places one. So you can leave a Fax program running, waiting for a fax you know is coming, while using Dial-Up Networking to pick up your email. In the past you had to cancel the first program, to free up the modem, before you could launch a second program using the modem. With TAPI, the Fax program simply recedes into the background, like background printing.