User Assistance: Writing for a High-Context Culture

What we consider to be good technical writing often reflects an American cultural perspective. One facet of this cultural orientation is that technical writing tends to use a low-context style. Most notably, we tend to write user assistance as if users have never seen the user interface we are explaining. Secondly, we tend to write user assistance as if users have never even used software before. But users rarely go to Help before they have tried to accomplish a task on their own first, and most users today have extensive experience using software and are familiar with the standard ways of interacting with user interfaces. So a user interface is a high-context artifact—one a user has already seen before reading our documentation and that uses rules and conventions the user already knows.

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Documentation>Help>Technical Writing

Writing Help Is...Challenging

I'll never be able to be a technical writer. How do those people do it?

Osherove, Roy. ISerializable (2003). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>Help

Placing Value on User Assistance

User assistance writers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of the UX world, bemoaning the fact that we don’t get any respect. I think the real problem is that user assistance folks are not particularly good at communicating the ways in which we add value to an enterprise. This column explores two models that show how user assistance adds value and how we can communicate that value to those who pay our salaries—something I would like to encourage other user assistance writers to do.

Hughes, Michael A. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>Help

Is Help Necessary?

Do we need to have an external help system? Why not embed help right into the application? Why not take this a step or two further? Instead of having a separate help system, integrate more useful, more robust, and context-sensitive help into the user interface.

Nesbitt, Scott. DMN Communications (2009). Articles>Documentation>Help>Technical Writing