There’s been quite a few blog posts recently by a variety of bloggers and companies about the current state of User Assistance (such as online Help) and possible ways it could be improved. We thought it might be useful to provide a summary of all the different ideas floating around. This summary primarily looks at… Read more »
Category: user assistance
New design models for providing end user Help
Ray Gallon has recently completed a series of webinars looking at new models for providing end user Help (A Cognitive Design for User Assistance). In the third webinar, Ray looked at how people learn today and he suggested a new approach for the future. He used The Common European Framework of Reference for Language‘s description of… Read more »
The future of technical documentation is more about psychology than technology
In the quest to offer better forms of user assistance, most experts in the technical communications profession propose technological solutions: using XML, intelligent and adaptive content etc. to present essentially the same type of guidance as has been provided for the past 20 years. We believe there has been a change in the relationship between… Read more »
How can you tell if it’s only beginners reading your user guides and online Help?
One way of checking to see if only new users are using the technical documentation for a product is to check if there a correlation between the number of users reading the user documentation and the sales of the product. For example, if the product is following the classic “Bell curve”, and users only need… Read more »
Searching for key words and phrases in training videos – Adventures in media synchronization
One of the limitations of video-based information has been the difficulties for users in finding a particular piece of information in a video. Usually, they have to watch the whole video, or “peck and hunt” to get to the moment containing the information they were searching for. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, HTML5, an… Read more »