Figure 1
Figure 2
This paper examines major issues of designing online help system. A well designed online help system should bring relevant information to users when they need it and guide them through the interface just as a human teacher would. It helps users with a problem as efficiently as possible without requiring the users to study a topic in depth. Guidelines and recommendations about how to design such a good online help system will be provided in this paper.
In today's marketplace, ease of use is becoming critical to product's survival. While the software is becoming more complex nowadays, the customers are hoping that designers can make "using it" simpler. It is why a well-designed online help system is becoming an essential component of software products. A well-designed online help can bridge the gap between the complexity of the software and the user's need for simplicity [4].
Online help is the online delivery of performance-oriented information. Online help system provides information, which is designed to answer the question "How do I?", to help users complete some task. The information may be facts, procedures, or even explanation. But what is a good online help system and how to develop a good online help systems? It requires designers to anticipate what users will need help with. To understand user's minds requires more thorough research and planning than for traditional hardcopy manuals. The designers must work closely with the users to design the task flow of the online help, with the usability engineers to ensure that cognitive and ergonomic aspects are complementary, and with the software engineers to understand what is technically feasible.
Let's discuss the differences between online help and traditional hardcopy manuals [3]. Online help has the restriction in screen size of the online display. However, online help system has the ability to interact with the user and to provide dynamic, animated displays. Hardcopy manuals have difficulties for cross-referencing or multiple representations of information. The requirements for navigation aids, for example, menu design and search mechanisms are also quite different between these two media.
Today, we can see that online help is a replacement for, or augmentation of, hardcopy manuals. What are the advantages of online help?
Of course, there are disadvantages to the online help. First, displays may not be as readable as printed manuals. Second, the user interface of help systems may be novel and confusing to novices. However, these problems can be reduced or eliminated as the resolution of displays improves and the size of the screen is larger. For most contemporary software, failure to provide online help will be seen as deficiency by most reviewers and users. Good writing, task orientation, context sensitivity, and appropriate examples contribute to improved online help.
Designers of online help system are often responsible for identifying the content and structure of menu systems, as well as being generally responsible for the structure of the documentation systems that are implemented as databases. Designers are subjected to various constraints when preparing online documentation. The constraints are grouped into two categories: system constraints and user constraints. System constraints included screen size, access mechanism, memory and disk space, and lack of context. User constraints include the need for a quick solution and variability in user sophistication. From the previous research, three primary skills that designers of online documentation must learn:
Users primary goal is to complete a task and they want online help systems to give them fast response and clear instructions. The question is how designers can develop a well online help system and what are the strategies. Some guidelines are illustrated in the next section.
1. Understand how users will represent their problems.
At the first stage of developing online systems, designers should understand 1) who is the audience, 2) what will they do with the product, 3) what knowledge do they have, 4) what is their attitude, 5) what information will they need. The best way to collect answers for these questions is to visit potential members of the audience, to do interviews, or using market analyses and survey. However, designers may attempt to answer these questions based on their own experience and cannot represent what the real users needs. Designers should keep this in mind, "Interacting with the target audience may be the most significant force behind successful design."
An online help system should provide answers to procedural, descriptive, and interpretative questions because those three types of questions are the most common questions that users might ask. An online help systems should also support a large and various user vocabulary, including both real world and computer terms and as many synonyms as possible.
2. Design the points of access to the help system.
Once designers have rough ideas about the topics that the help system might include, designers should consider how to get users into the help system. In general, a Help menu or command should remain in a constant position across programs. Users won't have to remember how to get into the help system so that users can always know where to find it.
What goes on the Help menu? There should be a topic that is related to the help system itself. It should describe how to use the help system and emphasize the strategies for using the various components of the help system. Also users can see other methods of access to help when they pull down the Help menu. For example, keyboard shortcuts such as Control-? should be assigned to the task-oriented component of the help system (see Figure 1). Moreover, the online help system should support different strategies for finding the information - users can scan a table of contents; users can turn to an index and look for specific terms; or they can open the manual to a particular page and browse the information (see Figure 2). Another approach is called context-sensitive help. The users can press F1 or a help key to produce information about the item on which the cursor is resting. One more thing to be kept in mind is to reduce the levels of hierarchy through which users must navigate.
Figure 1
Figure 2
3. Design screens to help users scan and use the help content.
When users ask to see a topic, designers should decide how to map the content onto the screen. Designers should consider the following issues related to the displaying content in a window.
4. Design and write the content itself.
In preparing the content for help, designers must produce clean, clear prose as described in much of the literature on document design and online help. The help system should support descriptive, procedural, and troubleshooting content. Designers should provide minimal, concise instructions for the user to minimize the amount of reading required. Users can then get more in-depth information, or elaborations, by layering the elaborations in another window. In this way designers can pitch the primary instructions at an "appropriate" level of competence for the audience. When users come across a step they do not know how to perform, they use the elaborations windows to acquire the additional knowledge.
5. Implement a model for navigation.
When developing the content and determining how to display it, designers must consider the navigational model for the help system as a while. Designers should run through typical and atypical scenarios in which users will have to navigate through help. By judging these scenarios, they can then make a first guess about the basic functionality required for navigation. It is important to balance the necessary and beneficial navigational functions against the overall complexity of the presentation window. If users are confronted with too many decisions on a screen, the help system may end up too confusing for users who are just learning. Therefore, help should begin with a simplistic navigational model and add functionality only as necessary. Hypertext linking should also be limited or designed to reduce the number of decisions that users must make, even given the prevalence of hypertext applications. The help should strive to bring relevant information to the user, not require the user to go to it.
6. Make it easy for users to apply information to the situation at hand.
The help system should allow users to be able to refer to the help information and to use the application at the same time. The application still receives menu and keyboard events, and the user can continue working even though the help window is visible. Moreover, clicking the help window, perhaps to go to another topic, does not deactivate the application and activate the "help system". Figure 4 shows an example of a help balloon [1]. In this way, the user is able to refer to the help information and to use the application at the same time.
Figure 4
7. Online tutorials, demonstration, and animation.
Online tutorial will introduce first-time users to the fundamental concepts, intended uses, and important functionality of a software package. The user does not have to keep shifting attention between the terminal and the instruction material when using online tutorial. Users may practice the skills needed to use the system. Demonstration (demo) is becoming a modern high-tech art form. It is designed to attract potential users of software or hardware by showing off system features using the best animations, color graphics, sound, and information presentation that advertising agencies can produce. The demo can be put on CD-ROMs or on the World Wide Web. Animations as part of online help are increasing common as hardware improves and competition increases. A simple and ingenious approach is to animate the action icons in a display to give a quick demonstration of usage. However, the benefits of animations for learners of user interfaces are still unclear.
8. Make use of world wide web.
In addition to ship the online help system with the software product, it is also a good way to make online help systems available through a well-known distribution mechanism, such as a Web site. These two can also be combined together by using items in the Help menu that will link to the web sites. For example, Microsoft Visual Basic put related web sites in the Help menu. Users can just click the item and connect directly to the web site through the Internet (see Figure 5). Thus, users may see the up-to-date information by surfing the Web and it is easy for designers to update information on the help web site. Moreover, by using the software logs, the help designers may capture the frequency of use for each page, or at least for each component of a database. Such statistics can reveal patterns that provide guidance for help designers to improve the content of online help system.
Figure 5
Creating online help systems demands more thorough research and analysis of the users' environment and their use of the product. Online help should be developed before the implementation to help the development team to define the interface and to allow adequate time for testing. Though online help provides rapid retrieval and traversal of large database, it should be well designed not to overwhelm the users. A good help system should bring relevant information to users when they need it and guide them through the interface just as a human teacher would. It will assist users with a problem as efficiently as possible without requiring the users to study a topic in depth. A well designed online help system should provide as many realistic examples as possible, use consistent terminology, and support error recognition and recovery. Where appropriate, a help system can also play sounds, run animations, and play movies. In spite of online help system, there is appealing evidence that social mechanisms among peers such as news group, online communities, and frequently asked question (FAQ) lists are also helpful. Users can get more effective assistance through these media.
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