Hot answers tagged help
43
It would certainly be a mistake to use the letter x as the multiplication symbol as x itself often denotes an algebraic term:
eg compare
x x y = c
vs
x × y = c
The × or × or &#D7; character looks like this: × so it is a proper cross, as opposed to the letters x (ex) or * (asterisk) symbols which are a lazy approach ...
23
A question mark ? doesn't represent 'help'. It represents a question in general, or a question about more information on a specific point. Some apps and websites have used it for contextual help as it is cleaner for that.
If you want a menu option for a help menu, call it "help". This has become so entrenched that the name for it is a "help menu". ...
18
If it's the help menu, please just call it that way:
It makes it easier to find
I don't have to think about it "oh, they probably put the help menu under ?"
and it's a larger target for me to click on.
Alt- keyboard combinations should be secondary to having an easily understandable name for the menu option. I don't believe they're that important anymore ...
14
When you have categories, there are often items that don't fit into any category well, and so you are left with a choice between having a category with a single item in it, or a catchall category like 'other'.
If the item isn't needed in the first place, then regardless of whether it fits into a category or not, you should not include it. That said, I will ...
13
I'm going to contribute a narrow response, so I'm not going to answer all of your question.
Research reported by Andrea Ames quite a few years ago as a mini-conference at UBC's downtown campus, suggested that embedded assistance and usability are better than Help. She told the story of how she compared three different Help-delivery methods with/in a ...
13
Someone once said that "Help is for the advanced users". (Don't remember the source now, but it's been with me for the last 15 years).
At first, this sounds like a contradiction. But if you think about it, it's true.
Novice users need an intuitive interface. If they are stuck, they will most likely play with it until they figure it out - or perhaps ...
11
It's a shame that I found the solution after posting my own question.
So I will just share it there. Wikipedia recommends using The HTML entity × which will be resulted in × for multiplication:
Multiplication
List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
10
Try using psychology.
We've been exploring social proof and set completion in our app to get people to try out more stuff. It boils down to keeping track of features they use and then suggesting that if they use one more, they'll complete some visible metric (like a badge, or a LinkedIn-style profile completion meter). We don't actually give them anything, ...
10
Popups are good as long as:
a) they're not obtrusive
b) you can easily dismiss them (the Stack Exchange model is to dismiss them by clicking anywhere on the popup itself)
c) the user has some way of turning them off permanently. This could be either through a configuration switch or, as in the case of Stack Exchange, they disappear once you reach a ...
10
I think it helps to have it there because the term itself (CVV, CSC) is not very intuitive when compared to the other terminology associated with a credit card. For example, card number, expiration date, name on the card, etc.
Even though online shopping is more common these days, some people may not quite understand what CVV/CSV means at a quick glance. ...
9
It can be tough to get people to read. Sometimes they'll assume they know what you want and will refuse to read the help. The obvious answer would be to make your app so simple that it requires no explanation. But it's not always that easy and it's something I've struggled with for a long time.
But in terms of context-specific help, I chose to make the ...
9
Because these instructions are supposed to be read after the user has tried and failed to interpret a field, not read first of all by every user.
In the case of the Twitter examples, these texts often don't actually explain how to fill in the field, but rather how to make a decision. That is, they are supposed to be read only if a user struggles with a ...
8
I think it has got to do with accessibility, screen readers can be set (or is it default behavior?) to read the 'title' of the links. This practice makes particular sense for high volume sites like google who probably get a fair number of users using screen readers.
note: page from 2005!
ref to study how the screenreader reads the TITLE attribute in various ...
8
First of all, the KB article you cited is rather old. It's dated July 13, 2004. There have been 2 major Windows OS releases since then and one more has entered a public beta.
Secondly, it sounds like you have misunderstood the note in the KB article.
The use of a right-justified Help menu in an application is not the recommended style for creating ...
8
In general, a question mark ? represents a question and not help. However, in a Windows environment, which is the case here, the question mark actually represents help. The following screenshot is taken from SharePoint 2010 where the hovering the question mark picks up the tool tip : Help (new window).
Or using Command Prompt adding a question mark after ...
7
As others said, you should look into generating HTML files that you ship with your product for help. One of our products (used in an environment without internet access) has been doing this for years and many users prefer it to the PDFs we also ship because the navigation is easier, the content lays itself out to fit the browser window, and the chunk size ...
7
We produced a short video of Handcraft last summer (no longer available) and learned a lot. We might use what we learned in the future to do something again, but one of the most important lessons was that it's hard to get right. Because you have some priorities on the user experience side (like Csongor says, keep it short and simple, etc), you're creating ...
7
Users are often more interested to know How do I go about to achieve this goal that I have, rather than investigating the purpose for random actions and CTA's that they currently see in the application.
The reason it was removed was simply that it was found more efficient and helpful to focus on finding "good" solutions for letting a user search the answer ...
6
People don't read. The best help is no help. Of course to do that, you need to put a ton of time and work into the UX.
So, assuming you do need help, I'd suggest the best would be context sensitive help that can link to your web site with the latest up-to-date help information. You'd publish help as HTML, saving you from proprietary CHM production ...
6
I would consider revealing the help gradually:
If you set a standard where each field has a tooltip, you can avoid any special icon - the user will immediately know mouse over will result in a tooltip.
Each tooltip should have a link in it (or alternatively the whole tooltip is press-able) to expand it for a more in depth explanation. This explanation can ...
6
Just to be slightly contrary... is there a possibility that the users aren't using them because they're not the right features?
Where do the features come from? Who are they targeted at? What needs are they addressing?
Can you tell a story to the users about the new feature where it's solving a problem that they have?
If there are more features coming ...
6
I use TechSmith SnagIt v9. You can easily capture screen shots and add a whole bunch of things - callouts, stamps, geometric forms. I find it easy to use and very effective in making professional quality screen shots.
6
The idea that Help is for beginners is misguided. Novices don’t use help; advanced users do. Novices don’t use help because:
We are a victim of our own success. We’ve made apps and web sites that users can use without Help, so that’s what they expect. And, indeed, an app should be designed so that the average new user can be productive without opening help ...
6
Help sections inevitably fail. They are usually out of context, they are never comprehensive and they rarely speak the user's language. Most users just muddle through -- they "satisfice" achieving a good-enough result, or they leave.
You'd get more ROI by user-testing your interface and tuning it up based on feedback than you would creating a help section.
...
6
Here is my theory:
Its about the ROI. Its not that there is a good reason for the passive ui for help sections, by all rights every part of a system should have an excellent and active ui. But we tend to focus harder on the core customer experience, because that's where the money is. And just tack on documentation / help sections. The effort that help ...
6
From a personal experience, I find FAQs quite useful, specially in services websites (and essential in the case where there are fees and legal issues involved). Advantage is, a FAQ page allows to anticipate questions, which can be translated into spending less time on mails and phone calls, and saving the users time spent hunting for answers. They are quite ...
6
Microsoft still supports context help, and there is no real reason not to use context help. The article Designing Context-Sensitive Help (Windows) from april 2012 shows that this is still valid:
You can create context-sensitive help for many of your program's interface elements. In dialog boxes, users can display help by clicking the question mark in the ...
5
To my knowledge their are two things to improve on a basic FAQ page:
questions that are actually frequently asked, or in another way, really interesting;
and let the answers appear on the place were people might actually have that question
MOO does theirs quite good I think. For example:
have the categories dropdown on the top of their page (hover "Ask ...
5
Jing is what I use daily (PC or MAC). It will do stills or movies, and can upload either to Screencast.com for sharing.
5
It might be for consistency. If users see tooltips on most links/buttons/images, and then they move over something and don't see it, they might wait for it or think the site is broken. Instead of removing the redundant tooltip, it would be better to make useful tooltips for all such elements (or none, if the links are self-explanatory).
This is different ...
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