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A reader sent me Cherryleaf – Article – nine trends in online user assistance There are places where […]

A reader sent me Cherryleaf – Article – nine trends in online user assistance

There are places where I think they are right on:

“Applications can suffer from Help windows being placed in inconvenient locations — often covering the portion of the interface on which the user is working. You can embed Help into the application and make information viewable as part of the application window itself. ”

Contextual help that prevents errors is some of the most useful help you can provide. Contextual help that appears in close proximity to an error or problem is the next best help you can provide. Context is a key to understanding, proximity for relevence… it’s just good.

Other things in the article I found a bit wonky: “This movement towards organizations creating customizable products and services is likely to create a need for personalized and customizable user documentation that is quick and cheap to produce.”

I”m moderately certain they are suggesting allowing customers to customize help. I reread it a couple times, and I’m feeling pretty confident this is the point (it’s a bit less clear than some other sections)

If that is true, it’s a bad idea. My experience with customization and personalization is that it is highly task-context sensitive.

Customizing a personal homepage is perceived as useful by users, customizing a help page is not. The users I’ve seen would first prefer not to go to help at all (under any circumstance, once the reasons contextual help is so much better than documentation-style help) BUT if they do you go help they want to go in, find the answer and get out as fast as possible. No lingering over whether their headers should be sea green or sky blue, just “get me my frigging answer now please.”

Personalization in shopping is good… but I shudder to think what personalization might do in help– imagine the user seeing related help to a problem they had once before “Hey, why does the help keep telling em that? Sure, I goofed up once, but I figured it out! Why does this program hate me?”

Okay, that might be a bit excessive. But still… i think product managers should be wary of trends in design. Just because the industry is excited about this or that cool feature, doesn’t mean your product should do it too.

Anyhow, lots to think about in this article.

10 Comments

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  1. 1
    Eric Scheid

    I wouldn’t mind a help system that allowed me to (a) specify if i want geek-speak or explain-it-to-your-mother speak, (b) turn off all references to specific modules which I just don’t care about at all, and (c) let me scribble extra notes into the help documentation

  3. 3
    Daniela Meleo

    I’m grappling with moving existing paper-based guides for a web app into some form of “web help”. I prefer the idea of embedding the help exactly where it’s needed (as in the article’s flight booking example) but in our case that would involve re-designing & simplifying the entire app (not likely to happen too soon, for the usual reasons). Meantime, links from specific forms in the app to the related pieces of help, and links from the help / guide to the relevant app page seem like a good way to cater to users who 1)need help at a specific point in the process, or 2)are browsing the help & wish to jump in to the app to perform the task being discussed.
    Would web app help be an example of where opening a link in a second browser window is actaully a *good* idea for once? (so the user can keep the help available & refer to it as needed while working in the app..)
    A “user customisation” of sorts that I’d to see would be a way for “personalised” help to keep a list of topics you’ve read (to replace the old help “bookmarking” feature which no one seems to implement anymore.)
    Interesting article… (long post for a chronic lurker – sorry) Daniela

  4. 4
    Jared Spool

    I think I understand what the author is discussing. Think of an application, such as SAP, Seibel, or PeopleSoft, where an organization (let’s say a Bose, Chevron, or the Montgomery County School District) purchases the app then customizes it for their particular needs. They’ll customize the look and feel, plus they’ll change the language of the app to match their existing business terminology and work processes.

    The problem is that the help is for the original, uncustomized version. I think this part of the article was discussing potential of creating help that can be customized by those customers (who in turn provide it to their end users) — not so much about modifications by end users.

    Taken to it’s logical extreme, one could imagine mass customization, which is the basis of the 1-to-1 movement. Here, you’d create a help system that somehow detected the customizations that have been made for a user and instantly morphs itself to match.

    Welcome to markup language hell.

    To answer Daniela’s question, I’d point her to the Dell site. Choose Home/Home office, then on the machine’s presented click on any link that says “Rebate Offer”, “Offer Details”, or “Learn More”. These are pop-ups that expand on the text and, at least in our tests, seem to work well. (Of course, you’d want to test them in your app to see if they work equally as well.)

    Keep in mind that our testing shows that the more users access help, the less they are likely to complete the task. So, creating a design that doesn’t force the user into help is always the best approach. It seems designers can use the use of help as a negative measure of the effective of the design.

  5. 5
    William Birn

    Hiya. I wrote the article. Jared is right in his understanding of what I said. He just said it more clearly than I did.

    Mass customisation is a term in vogue with Ford and others. It’s the idea that you offer a bespoke product – A Focus with a stripy roof and a cup holder on the steering wheel – at a cheap price. So we may see a day soon when you could buy MS Word with only the bits you want, plus extra bits unique to your situation. 1-1 Marketing indeed.

    So what do software vendors do – Ship the Help system that is for the original, uncustomised version or build a Help system for each unique solution supplied? Or should the vendor get the customer to amend the text?

    This leads to some major issues– how to re-use, re-purpose the information and how to make it usable. Help may longer look like Help, and this raises issues as to who in the organisation should create it.

    PS I do like this site.

  6. 6
    William Birn

    Hiya. I wrote the article. Jared is right in his understanding of what I said. He just said it more clearly than I did.

    Mass customisation is a term in vogue with Ford and others. It’s the idea that you offer a bespoke product – A Focus with a stripy roof and a cup holder on the steering wheel – at a cheap price. So we may see a day soon when you could buy MS Word with only the bits you want, plus extra bits unique to your situation. 1-1 Marketing indeed.

    So what do software vendors do – Ship the Help system that is for the original, uncustomised version or build a Help system for each unique solution supplied? Or should the vendor get the customer to amend the text?

    This leads to some major issues– how to re-use, re-purpose the information and how to make it usable. Help may longer look like Help, and this raises issues as to who in the organisation should create it.

    PS I do like this site.

  8. 8
    joe

    Back in the mid-90s I was the documentation manager for a small software company (since snapped up by SAP). We provided highly customized software. Our customers wanted to be able to customize the help–from translating it for the Canadian customers to putting their internal procedures & policies into the help system. They also wanted source files of the documentation to edit that according to their desires. These were companies like Dayton Hudson, Walgreens, and Marshall Fields–corporations that bought software to implement in their organizations.

    So, in that sense, help that a customer customizes would be different from help that a user customizes. I think that’s what William’s referring to. In that case, it’s a matter of negotiation and architecture between the software maker and the software buyer–in the sense that the software buyer is a corporate customer. Like Christina, I don’t see one-off users burdened with the task of maintaining documentation for the software they’re using.

    The idea of annotation’s interesting, and it’s of course been around for awhile–for example, given a PDF version of a user’s guide: buy Adobe’s Acrobat, add little notes where you want, and save the doc. yet the amount of work isn’t commensurate with the reward, right?

    Interesting to see different tech-writing issues cropping up on IA-related sites…I love it!

    joe

  9. 9
    Lawrence

    When learning complex software, like Photoshop or, even more so, some 3D environment like Maya, one usually only learns parts at a time. I still don’t know much about Photoshop’s print abilities, since I don’t work much with print. Maya, of course, can take a year or two to learn well.

    It would be nice to be able to create a “best of” or “most used” access list to certain parts of the help section. With Photoshop, there was a long stretch when I read often about layers, but not about Print, so having a shortcut just to the layers section of help would have been nice.

    On a side note, there are some issues (color management, Photoshop filters, Photoshop Layer effects) where it seems like there are only 3 people in the world who really know what is going on, and all of them are the programmers who worked on the technology. Therefore it would be damn nice if companies occasionally made those programmers available for interview and Q&A. (This seems to happen occassionally in the Open Source world and not at all in the closed source world – but fears that a programmer is going to give away The Secrets seem exaggerated.)

    Again, when it comes to color management or filters one can go to hundreds of sites where users are discussing these things and comparing empirical notes on experiments they’ve done, slowly and painfully figuring out how things work, but wouldn’t it be nice if the programmer in charge of technology occassionally just told us how these things work?

  10. 10
    David Locke

    Shortcuts, those links that open the appropriate dialog in an application are very hard to develop. The parameter values are not something that we can extract. What we have to do is go to the programmer, who just finished the UI a week before gold. So you don’t have time to get to them, and you don’t have time to make it work. We don’t have a tool, although it should be easy to idenify the resource and then identify the values needed to make the shortcut work.

    Custom applications imply custom documentation.

    The original version of most software is a custom application. While the custom application is built, it is documented by the systems integrators. After the custom application is completed, the developers stip out the customer identity elements and have a generic help. If help wasn’t compiled customizations would be easy. There are ways to split compliled content from uncompiled content.

    CSS should let you give your customers the font size they want.

    Help as a negative measure of effectiveness extends to all documentation, all training except classroom training, and all technical support. Gartner defined negative use cost back while they were defining the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). They left out all the costs that couldn’t be found in the accounting system. These were use costs. Classroom training and the cost of paid technical support were included in the TCO. Desktop training, manuals, help, time spent on the phone with tech support, time spent on bugs and reinstalls, etc. constitute negative use costs and were omitted from the TCO. Try selling a businessman on the notion that improved reading speeds will improve his business. NO WAY! The accounting system is blind to reading.

    So who should write documentation? The issue really is what documentation. Too much time is spent writing tool tasks or artifical tasks to cover what the software makes us do. Task sublimation is the answer, not another doc.

    But, Jarred, I’ve wanted to ask you this since my boss came back from a WinWriters quoting your statement that nobody uses context-sensitive help, why is that? Did technical writers teach users not to use it? Did the notion of task-centric help really screw-up the rewards of context-sensitive help? Is context-sensitivity about navigation or presentation?

    I do agree though that doc is a negative indicator of effectiveness.

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