Help that's actually helpful

Posted on Sep 3, 2008 in Design, IT | 0 comments

Software used to come shipped in boxes as big as cereal box. Why? Well, to hold that 400+ page manual of “help” that software users dutifully placed on their shelf where it ready to answer any question that may arise (read: gathered dust). Well, that was the 80s and 90s and online help has come a long way. Much software doesn’t have a printed component any longer because it’s cheaper and (often) better to produce help that’s viewed on screen.

Going beyond on-screen reading of text, help has become more and more interactive. At first it was simply hyperlinks that allowed you to peruse “related topics” or “similar questions” easier than you can in a printed manual. Contextual help (information and explanations that appear near the feature or tool in question) became the norm, usually presented as a small question mark or “what’s this” text link (see an example from Google Analytics at right).

The next step in this evolution of online help is truly interactive, where a help system actually guides the user not with static images within the help document, but actual visual cues to the process being explained. I ran across an excellent example of this the other day in Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac.

I wanted to add a drop cap to the document I was working on. Rather than looking through menus, I went to the Help menu and this was how I found what I wanted:

1. Easy search – Leveraging Mac OS X’s built-in Spotlight search technology (which in itself is pretty great), I searched
   for “drop” and before I could type “cap,” Spotlight had shown me what I wanted.
2. Menu activation – When I clicked what I wanted, “Drop Cap…” the appropriate menu within Word came down.
3. Visual cues – To my surprise, not only did the menu item highlight, an unmistakable blue arrow floated gently next to the item to ensure I couldn’t possibly miss the result of my help search.

Now that’s useful help. No wonder software doesn’t come with a three-inch-thick pile of dead tree. If paper manuals could dream, they would  do so about providing this sort of contextual, relevant response to a user’s query.

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