Evaluating Online Help

Online help excels in providing quick access to concise information - but only when the users choose to access it. Delivering high-quality online help that satisfies all users is a hard task. Several good help authoring tools make help generation and maintenance easier, but to create good content that is highly effective is still a huge challenge. Experience shows that even after following quality guidelines or best practices, the final output may still not be good enough to satisfy the needs of your users. Heuristic evaluation of an online help system provides an initial assessment of both quality and usability. This article presents a summary of key points for evaluating online help, though you will likely want to expand the heuristics with company or product-centric metrics suitable to your application.

Dalvi, Meghashri. Usability Interface (2008). Articles>Documentation>Help>Assessment

Method to Evaluate Manuals and Online Help  

In these testing times when time to market for software is constantly diminishing, the demand to make manuals and online help targeted, faster, cheaper and better is a tall order. While methods and tools are being constantly developed to help us do our work faster, and better, measuring the quality of the written word remains a deficient arena. Technical Communications gurus advocate methods like surveys and usability to make better end products. However, this requires good infrastructure and management support to carry out. This paper provides a method to evaluate technical manuals and online help for software products. It discusses how you can gauge a manual’s quality and suggests a method to quantify its effectiveness. It is cheap to implement and is customizable for your organization. All you need is good knowledge of your audience, and some faith and persistence!

Santhanam, Raji. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>Assessment>Help

Would You Use Just a Gardening Trowel to Plant a Tree? 

If your department has implemented reuse and single-sourcing techniques that eliminate inconsistencies, your end users are going to have a lot more faith in the validity of the content you provide.

Pringle, Alan S. Scriptorium (2009). Articles>Documentation>Assessment>Help