Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

Online help. User assistance. That thing that pops up whenyou press F1. No matter what you call it, user assistance isan important element in the experience of a user. It canmean the difference between a frustrated user and aproductive one.But is today's user assistance all it can be? Are we givingusers purposeful information at the right time, in the mosteffective format, and ultimately in the way that they need it?We don't think so.What we're going to discuss in this presentation is a different way of looking at user assistance. Some user assistancepractitioners are already doing (in one form or another) what we'll be talking about today. Help authoring tools can, orsoon will be able to, generate the kind of purposeful, user-friendly online help that we'll be discussing.What we're going to say will sound prescriptive. You cantake it that way if you want to. Our goal is to open your eyesto a different way of looking at and designing userassistance. Our goal for the next 50 minutes is to have youthink differently about online user assistance and embrace asimpler, more powerful

way of delivering it

Think Simple: A Fresh Approach to User Assistance

By: Aaron Davis and Scott Nesbitt

Note

: Throughout this presentation, we'll be using the terms

help

online help

, and

user assistance

interchangeably.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Envision, for a moment, online help as it was. And as it is.Can you think of any major differences? What do you thinkabout when you hear the words

online help

?User assistance hasn't radically changed over the years.Sure, delivery formats have changed, there are some coolsingle sourcing tools available, and we can re-purposecontent for a wide variety of uses. But the structure anddesign of most help systems and the type of content thatthey contain, is often the same as it was in 1995. And that's where user assistance has fallen down -

by not meeting theneeds of today's user

.On top of that, many technical communicators aredeveloping user assistance for more than just the monitor ona desktop PC or a laptop. Consider smartphones and mobileapplications. User assistance for a broad range offunctionality must be delivered within a limited amount ofscreen real estate. The online help paradigm as wecommonly know it is simply not suitable for these platforms.Take, for example, Viigo. It's an RSS client for varioussmartphones. The technical writer at Viigo spent a lot of time working with standard tools, and yet couldn't get the help tocome out just right – it would work well on some of thesupported devices, but not others. She eventually turned toXML. Now, there is only one XML document for all supportedplatforms.

Online user assistance as it was (and often is)

Too often, help is a copy of the user manual in anotherformat – HTML Help, WebHelp, WinHelp, or whatever. Helpauthors may choose to remove graphics and change crossreferences to hyperlinks, but users are still essentially gettinga version of the manual when they press F1.Why is it done this way? A variety of reasons. For some,there's a perception that this is the way it's always beendone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That doesn't mean thingscan't improve. Inertia from management can also be aproblem. There may be time constraints – short developmentcycles require some technical communicators to hammer outdocumentation quickly and as best they can based on thoseconstraints. They might have to forego certain niceties inorder to get the job done.Case in point: when we worked at a large enterprisesoftware firm, the PDF output did double duty as the printedmanual and the online help for the application. Help wastriggered through hooks built into the app that launchedAcrobat Reader. Users weren't getting a true online helpsystem that provided purposeful content at just the right time.

Instead, they had to navigate a user manual. There was justtoo much information for the reader to wade through to get to what they need

Is single sourcing always the path to take?

Let's talk about single sourcing for a moment. The way manyof us do it is first write your content in FrameMaker or Wordor whatever. Then, pull those files into a help tool likeRoboHelp or WebWorks. From there, output the help. Doingthat is familiar. It's comfortable. But in some cases, it's notthe best solution.Sometimes, though, that single sourcing method isn't thebest solution. Instead, why not author the user assistancedirectly? Say you're documenting a simple desktop or mobileapplication, or one that's served over the Web. In thesecases, having a separate printed or PDF manual doesn'tmake all that much sense.With the simple application – and by simple, we meansomething that's not as monolithic as Word but not asrudimentary as Notepad – chances are users won't look atthe manual. OK, that's not so different from normal ...Seriously, though, they're more likely to press F1 to getassistance.Many Web-based applications are more complex than thesimple desktop or mobile application. In this case, the userassistance is delivered over the Web.With both, it's faster and easier to build purposeful helpdirectly than to first create a guide and then do the usualsingle sourcing magic.Here's a good example of this: the help for Viigo, the mobileapplication that we mentioned earlier. When the technical writer at Viigo started working on the help, she ran into anumber of issues:

•

Using a standard single sourcing tool, she created tri-paned HTML help. There were too many panes, andthe help didn't render well on a mobile device.

•

There are multiple screen sizes for mobile devices,and what looks good on one may not look good onanother.

•

Navigation was a problem, and she couldn't use anested table of contents.After a lot of thought and consultation with the company'sWeb designer, she wrote the help using XML and on-the-flyXSLT tranforms dynamically output the help to all of Viigo'ssupported platforms.

Another path: think simple

Simple. It's not a four letter word, but it's often treated likeone. Simple doesn't mean incomplete, inadequate, or

dumbed down

.To us,

simple

means

streamlined

. When

of 00

Think Simple: A Fresh Approach to User Assistance (Notes)

The notes to the presentation that we gave at DocTrain West 2009 on simplifying user assistance

Download or Print

453 Reads

Info and Rating

Category:	Uncategorized.
Rating:
Upload Date:	03/23/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	help documentation online help user assistance Internet & Technology Presentations & Spreadsheets help documentation online help user assistance Internet & Technology Presentations & Spreadsheets (fewer)