Tag Archives: help

Does looking at online Help make users forget?

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Treasury at Petra, JordanOver the weekend, Dr Chris Atherton suggested I look at “the doorway effect”. You may well have experienced walking through a doorway and then finding you’d forgotten why you’d stood up in the first place.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have discovered your brain is not to blame for your confusion about what you’re doing in a new room – the doorway itself is.

 

 

From Scientific American:

The researchers say that when you pass through a doorway, your mind compartmentalizes your actions into separate episodes. Having moved into a new episode, the brain archives the previous one, making it less available for access.

The doorway can be a virtual doorway as well as a physical doorway. The researchers’ experiments involved seating participants in front of a computer screen running a video game.

So is this effect also happening when users need to leave a screen in a software application and read Help – be it delivered as a .CHM file, on a Web site or on paper?

The solution? If we deliver User Assistance (Help) in a way that it is actually located within the application screens, not only can we minimise the need for users having to go through a virtual door, we can also embed the learning into the users’ specific situations.

More: Scientific American article

Introducing the Head Up Display. Say hello to the future of the menu

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The Ubuntu operating system is to replace its application menus with a  “head-up display” (HUD) box. According to Mark Shuttleworth, Lead design and product strategy person at the company behind Ubuntu:

We can search through everything we know about the menu, including descriptive help text, so pretty soon you will be able to find a menu entry using only vaguely related text (imagine finding an entry called Preferences when you search for “settings”).

 

One of the comments states:

I suspect that applications will need to give help documentation a more significant place in the development of the application than it currently enjoys. Help seems the logical place to embed command discovery in such a system especially in connection with a capacity for fuzzy searches.

UAEurope 2011 conference review

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UAEurope 2011 was possibly the most enjoyable and interesting conference in its long history.

Sonia Fuga of Northgate explained how they are using DITA, WordPress and Web 2.0 features to streamline the documentation process, simplify the review process and deliver interactive context sensitive Help for one of their larger applications. Delegates were interested in how their new Help included Google-like search results (produced by referencing DITA elements within the topics) and the ability for users to provide feedback and obtain notifications of content updates via RSS feeds.

Leah Guren presented her research into to the cultural dimensions of software Help usage. Her insights into the use of (and opinions towards) Help by beginners and advanced users were fascinating and counter-intuitive.

My presentation on applying games techniques to User Assistance seemed to have been well received.

In a number of presentations, there was the recognition that many users now go to the search engines when they get stuck. For those that can publish their Help on the Web, this poses no great problem. However, for those who are unable to do this (for confidentiality, security, legal or other reasons), they face the challenge of how to guide users away from the search engines and towards their Help. There were a number of approaches presented, and I suspect this issue will be raised and discussed again at future conferences.

On the Cherryleaf stand, located in the exhibition area, we were giving away cherry Sencha leaf tea, leaflets and some stickers. The stickers proved far and away the most popular.

Help is broken?

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Are we at the point when we need to acknowledge that classic online Help files are not working as well as they should – that is, as the primary source of information to assist users when they get stuck?

This is not a Don Draper “why I’m quitting tobacco” moment, and this is not a criticism of the Help Authoring Tool vendors. Instead, it’s a proposal that, in some situations, what is delivered as online Help needs to be substantially modified to meet the needs of many modern technologies and users.

What’s wrong with Help? Help is often a “walled garden” in an Internet-era built on knowledge sharing and collaboration. Usability in relation to the user interface can be poor at times. It’s hard to measure its value and the ROI. Even its purpose can be vague to some project managers. Unfortunately, there’s often just not enough time to make significant improvements. We could go on.

Many users still get stuck, and many products still fail to work when they’re linked to another. Words still are a key way of communicating and teaching users. We still need to assist users and we still need some form of Help. It could be a useful tool in “evangelism marketing”. It could do so much more. This is why we’re suggesting it’s time to take a strategic look at what and how we can provide Help for when users get stuck.

What do you think?

Should we change the structure of user guides to make them more inspiring?

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Nancy Duarte presented a talk on the hidden structure that the greatest communicators and persuaders have used over thousands of years:

She argues effective presenters move from “What is” to “What Could be” during their speech:

The effect is that changes happens – ideas get adopted.

It’s easier to see it working in training documentation, but with the development of knowledge bases and a more conversational and collaborative approach to user documentation, perhaps it could be applied there as well.

Nintendo patents new Help/User Assistance system

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Various computer games magazines are reporting news of a Nintendo patent for providing user assistance to players during a game.

The patent describes “Demo Play”, which is intended to keep casual players interested in complex games in a way that doesn’t conflict with hardcore gamers’ requirements.

Advanced players can play normally, while less experienced players can get the occasional helping hand. Hints will appear in a screen that pops up in the top right corner of the screen at different points of the game. These video hints would appear only when the player gets stuck on a particular puzzle for a set amount of time.

Potentially, the computer could take over the game playing at points too tricky for a less experienced user. In a second mode, an introduction or overview form named “digest mode”, the computer displays the game’s key scenes, and allows players the opportunity to stop the digest at any time and play the scene themselves.

According to the Kotaku Web site:

This patent, if implemented correctly, could successfully help gaming make the leap from narrative fun, to something more open-ended and free range, the first real sandbox video game.

Imagine being able to play a game with all of the benefits of characters, story and goals, but without having to spend 10 to 20 hours of your life to enjoy doing so.

It’s likely to be first seen in the Wii version of “The Prisoner of Zelda”, due out later this year.

User assistance developed for computer games could move across to desktop software and Web (SaaS) applications. It’s also possible that computer games developers will draw upon the lesson learnt from developing traditional user assistance, as their user base becomes more diverse.

Whether the patent restricts the opportunity to build on these ideas is something technical communicators and Help Authoring Tool developers will need to consider, should they wish to create a similar system.

Why you should write Help for your competitors’ products

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At our “Developing your career as a technical author”  course yesterday there was a great discussion about meeting the needs of “Generation Y” – the part of the working population under 27 who have grown up with the Internet. It’s a group that makes up about 13% of the working population.

We talked about the fact that they acquire so much of  their information from the Web. From many of them, if Google can’t find your content, it doesn’t exist.

This led me to think, if your competitors’  Help is not available on the Web, then why not write it for them?  With the majority of Generation Y using Google to find Help, there’s a good chance they would end up reading your version of Help.

This gives you the opportunity to explain the complexities of a particular competitor’s product and contrast it with your company’s offering. You could end up persuading prospects to buy your product instead of those of your competitors. You might even win some of your competitors’ customers.

“The worst Help system I have ever seen”

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Sarah Maddox reported from the WritersUA conference that Microsoft’s April Reagan gave a frank presentation on the planning and design that has gone into version 3 of Microsoft Help.

She was quoted as saying the feedback on the Help 2 (used in Windows Vista) was poor. For example, “This is the worst help system I have ever seen”. 

At a previous WritersUA conference, Joe Welinske reported Microsoft implemented a couple of changes when it developed the online Help for Vista. The biggest changes were (a) they developed a new Help viewer and (b) they used technical journalists instead technical authors to write the Help topics. They chose journalists because they wanted Help topics to be closer to knowledge-base articles. I’m not aware of any other major changes.

I wonder if the change in writing  style was the main cause of such negative feedback towards Vista’s Help. Users often just want to do things, and they can be best helped by short, clear chunks of text focused on getting the job done.

It will interesting to see if Microsoft changes its approach to writing, as well as the Help viewer itself,  in future releases of Windows.