Questions tagged [context-sensitive-help]

Help dialogues that take the current state of an application interface into account.

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35 votes
5 answers
14k views

Best practices for online help

we're currently developing a fairly complex web portal. To improve the user experience, we want to provide a context-sensitive online help system that can aid the user in understanding certain aspects ...
n3rd's user avatar
  • 459
30 votes
8 answers
5k views

Do people actually use tooltips?

I know I use them, and my peers use them, but how much does the average user actually use tooltips to figure out functionality?
Homer's user avatar
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3 votes
5 answers
4k views

Why is embedded help not popular?

I'm wondering why modern help systems are more passive than active? For example, each good guide through something look like this: So why we don't see this directly on website (service provider), but ...
Paul Podlipensky's user avatar
9 votes
3 answers
5k views

Context sensitive help - making sure they use it

I want to add a context-sensitive help to my interface. It's a complex of numerous screens and data fields, intended for the trained enterprise user. Following this question and this one about why ...
Dvir Adler's user avatar
  • 5,008
7 votes
4 answers
816 views

Context sensitive help for wordy user preferences

Current UI Here is a poorly designed panel on a preferences dialog for the open source audio editor 'Audacity'. I'd like to do something about it. How it got that way In the past the text beside ...
James Crook's user avatar
  • 4,603
1 vote
2 answers
117 views

What's a good way to provide help for grid columns in a tight space?

In my app, I've got grids like the following: It is not apparent, but if you click on the column header in the first three columns, it sorts by that column, but if you do this on the other columns (...
Joshua Frank's user avatar