Developing WebHelp: What 'How to' Design Doesn't Always Tell Us  

Development of the Intranet application STAR.IDN for requesting and receiving medically related supplies illustrates a broad spectrum of technological and user issues. As such it serves as a case study of design and user-related decisions between an application designer and a Help author. Central to the study is the argument that design must be based on an empirically 'informed' rather than 'assumed' user model. The project also challenges Web literature that does not address user considerations in its promotion of design methods.

Eiler, Mary Ann and Kathleen Bright. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Distributing Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser HTML Help Using the Microsoft Java Applet  

In a previous article we discussed what browser-based HTML Help is, and how you can use the HTML Help ActiveX control to create and distribute web-based HTML Help to Microsoft Internet Explorer Users. In this article we'll explain how to use the Microsoft Java Applet to create and distribute Help systems that can be viewed by an Java-enabled browser.

ComponentOne (1999). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Distributing Web-based HTML Help

In this article we discuss what browser-based HTML Help is, the sitemap file that's behind the HTML Help table of contents, how the HTML Help ActiveX control HHCTRL.OCX interprets and displays this sitemap file, and how you can automatically distribute HHCTRL.OCX.

ComponentOne (1998). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Do Technical Writers Need a Help Applications Course?  

Weber State University is in the process of developing a major in Professional & Technical Writing (PTW). Currently, students enroll as English majors with an Emphasis in PTW, which consists of four courses in PTW that students take in addition to other English courses. The minor consists of the same PTW courses plus two interdisciplinary classes, which are determined in consultation with an advisor. The problem is that students who wish to do PTW must take the same number of literature classes as other English majors. Often they do not receive instruction in document design, other than a cursory treatment in the service course. A full major would better prepare students to enter the job market without losing connections to critical theory and humanistic approaches to texts-connections they receive in English Department courses.

McShane, Becky Jo. CPTSC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Education>Documentation>Help

Document to the Question: Understanding What Users Ask and Where They Look for the Answers  

The user's idea of the problem is often very different than the help or program designer's. The online help topics often reflect the designer's viewpoint, not the user's.

STC India (2003). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Help

A Dozen Techniques to Improve Your Software Online Help

There are several main reasons why putting your software manual on-line is necessary. It makes your web-site attractive for search engine crawlers and therefore brings you targeted traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines. A good online manual presents your product as serious and credible. Moreover, if a user faces difficulty using your software and asks for technical support, you may easily resolve the issue by referring that user to a certain page of your online help. Simply give the page's URL. With just one click the user will see screenshots and explanations which will help them to resolve the issue.

Crane, Dennis. Dr. Explain (2005). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Dynamic Help in Web Forms

Many Web application designers strive to reduce the amount of instructional text that appears in the user interfaces they create. A likely part of their motivation is the perception that, if explaining how to use something requires too much instruction, it probably isn't that easy to use and, therefore, has room for improvement in its design. Another motivating factor might be the tendency for people not to read any on-screen instructions, just like they tend not to read product manuals. This type of thinking also applies to Web forms. When possible, designers strive to utilize a minimal amount of text to explain how users should fill in the different input fields in a form.

Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2007). Design>Web Design>Forms>Help

Effective User Assistance Design: Ten Best Practices

In a utopian world, a product would be so perfect it would not need any user assistance at all. But in reality, products aren't perfect, and users need assistance through different stages of their use. User assistance (UA)--in the form of manuals or online Help--guides users in their tasks, suggests better ways of getting their work done, and provides directions for troubleshooting their problems.

Dalvi, Meghashri. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Interface>Help>Online

eHelp Community Forums

A community discussion forum for users of eHelp software.

Adobe (2003). Resources>Mailing Lists>Software>RoboHelp

Electronic Documentation Basics

Below you can find a compilation of the most frequently asked questions about electronic catalogs. You will find answers to general as well as to technical questions.

ITEDO Software (2003). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Embedded Help – Meeting the Needs of Your Users  

Designing and developing an embedded help solution involves several stages. A successful solution starts with identifying user wants and needs. As you sort through these needs, identify common threads and design a solution that addresses these common threads. Consistency, flexibility, and experimentation are keys to developing a successful solution. Your design should be intuitive to use, and should provide users with the options they need. As you design your solution, consider your develop and maintenance requirements. You want the time you invest in the first version of your solution to pay off for future releases.

Mueller, Paul. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

EPSS: What Does It Mean to You

Electronic Performance Support System(s), or EPSS, automates three types of traditional performance support for software users: training, documentation, and help desks. Integrating these support mechanisms into software--using wizards, clear and simple interfaces, and various forms of embedded user assistance--allows novice users to perform competently with minimal help from training, documentation or calls to help desks.

Marion, Craig. Usability Interface (1999). Careers>Usability>Help

Error Accessing and Displaying CHM Files: Reasons and Solutions

So, you've got in trouble. Some or even all of your CHM files seem to have gotten corrupted. They show a "The page cannot be displayed" error in the left-hand pane of the CHM viewer. There are several possible reasons why your CHM e-books and documentation files are unreadable.

Crane, Dennis. Dr. Explain (2006). Articles>Documentation>Help>Microsoft Windows

Estimating Scope and Schedule for a Help Project  

During this session, we will learn how to create a topic list to determine project scope, and then we will begin to calculate how long it will take produce all of these topics. When we’re done, you will have a methodology for doing this for your own project.

Deaton, Mary M. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Project Management>Documentation>Help

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

The Evolution of a Help System  

An industry-wide design standard for help systems does not exist. To develop a flexible and usable help system for our workstation-based product, we have evolved and changed our help system design. Over a five-year period our help system was influenced by several factors:

Caldanaro, Regina M. and Michelle Corbin Nichols. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

Fault Tolerance: A More Forgiving Doc-To-Help and Word for Windows  

Doc-To-Help 2000 has a new 'fault tolerance' feature that forgives novice authors their Microsoft Word mistakes, including direct formatting and stretched bookmarks. These problems often cause corrupted cross-references as well as document-to-Help-system conversion problems. Doc-To-Help's automatic diagnostic and repair utilities now find these common errors and correct them automatically.

Wade, Jenny. ComponentOne (1999). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

A Few Thoughts on FOSS Help Authoring Tools

There's a lot of great free and Open Source (FOSS) software out there. But one area in which it's lacking is professional-level help authoring tools. In 2005, Linux.com published an article titled "FOSS help authoring tools falter". And not much seems to have changed in the intervening years.

DMN Communications (2008). Articles>Documentation>Help>Open Source

The Five W's of Online Help

For decades, journalists have used a proven approach called the 'Five W's' to answer the questions that the readers of newspaper articles most commonly want writers to answer. The questions are sufficiently useful that they can easily be applied outside newspaper writing, and I've already written about this in the context of audience analysis (Hart 1996). In this article, I'll show you how you can use these questions to develop more useful online help. Each of the five W's is a simple question that starts with the letter W: Why, Who, What, Where, and When. Some authorities add a sixth question, 'How,' to this list, but 'how to' information generally fits under what, where, or when, depending on the nature of the information. Users of online help can benefit greatly from the proven journalistic approach if we can answer these same five questions for each help topic that we create. In the remainder of this article, I'll provide an example of a failure to ask these questions, show how asking these five questions could have prevented this failure, and provide examples of typical questions we should be asking. Please note that, although I've presented these five questions in an order that seems logical to me, in practice the approach becomes iterative: It doesn't much matter where you begin, since answering one question often reveals important aspects of the other questions that you'd not yet considered.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. TECHWR-L (2002). Articles>Documentation>Help

From Information to User Assistance: A Support System for a User Technology Organization  

Our plight as users of process information is much like that of the users of the information for our software products. Like them, we want to do useful work and get appropriate assistance when we need it. Instead of just reading about a task such as writing an information plan, we want the templates and samples to use when writing the plan. Just-in-time assistance, experience captured in a useful form, would suit us just fine. This paper, by the designers and developers of a system that supports the work and processes of a user technology organization, presents the information design issues that we encountered and the design of the system that we created.

Hargis, Gretchen, Deirdre Longo and Lindsay Bennion. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

From Online Help to Embedded User Assistance  

Online help systems have evolved over the past twenty years to meet the needs of our users. Designers must consider the content, format, presentation, navigation, and access methods of online help systems. A series of design checklists based on the past 20 years of research are presented in this paper, which summarizes a journal article currently being considered for publication. The latest trend in online help system design is embedded user assistance, which includes integrating information into the interface and including an embedded help pane within that interface to display a context-sensitive online help system.

Corbin Nichols, Michelle. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

From Online Help to Integrated User Assistance: One Company’s Journey Beyond the Online Help Paradigm  

For usability’s sake, the development group at Strohl Systems created a navigational coach that embedded user assistance within the company's flagship product. Now we're redesigning the product and building it around the user assistance.

Marion, Craig. STC Proceedings (1999). Design>Documentation>Help

The Future of RoboHelp?

The RoboHelp help authoring tool is now entering its thirteenth year of existence. That's a remarkably long existence for any software title. In that time period, we have seen an amazing expansion of the software industry throughout the 1990s and an equally amazing retraction due to the bursting of the Internet bubble. Making its start in the tiny offices of Blue Sky Software in LaJolla, California, RoboHelp grew into an extremely profitable product. It is also a market leader—having capturing some two-thirds of all Help authoring tool sales. During the Internet bubble years the company changed its name to eHelp, but RoboHelp continued to be its flagship profit center. In 2003, eHelp (and RoboHelp) were acquired by one of the leading providers of web tools—Macromedia. Now it appears that the end may be approaching for RoboHelp.

Welinske, Joe. WritersUA (2005). Articles>Documentation>Software>Adobe RoboHelp

Going Online: A Case Study in the Development and Implementation of Netscape NetHelp  

Computerized Medical Systems, Inc. (CMS) - the worldâ*™s leading radiation therapy planning (RTP) company with over 1000 installed RTP systems and over 400 installed dosimetry systems - decided in late 1996 to move existing FOCUS documentation online. Reasons for this included: the existing documentation set perceived as too difficult to use; increasing printing cost; and customer feedback. Using Netscape NetHelp as a basis, the CMS documentation staff reduced printed documentation size by two-thirds while making the information more accessible. Reactions to FOCUSHelp have been highly favorable. Future plans include migrating to the NetHelp2 framework and reducing topic lengths.

Rupel, Roberta A., Ellard Douglas, Bill Bledsoe and Frank Watson. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>Help

Going Online: Selecting the Right Tool  

There are numerous tools that you can use to create online documentation. However, each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and each is more appropriate for some types of information than others. This workshop explores many issues of online documentation tools: Why go beyond Windows Help? Which is better: HTML or Adobe Acrobat? What tools support cross-platform presentation? When should you use Workgroup tools such as Lotus Notes or Folio? When does SGML make sense? How to utilize a!ocument databases? When to use Management tools? Real examples developed using these tools will be given throughout the session. Participants will leave with a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each.

Rockley, Ann. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Documentation>Software>Help