April Meeting: No User Left Behind –
Designing Online Help That is Helpful

by Jim Korth, PR Committee member

Does searching through online help sometimes feel like you’re digging through a giant electronic ring binder? When you enter a simple string of arguments into an online search engine, do you get a listing of replies that are so far from what you want that you just give up? Do users complain that they get bogged down while digging through a Table of Contents and never get beyond it? On April 10th, Marlowe and Marc will deliver their “No User Left Behind” presentation that walks the audience through a proven,

Details Thursday, April 10, 2008, 6:15-8:00 p.m. Crowne Plaza Hotel North Dallas-Addison 14315 Midway Road, Addison, Texas Need directions! Reservations (Reservations made after 5pm on April 7 are subject to a $5 penalty) Click to register for the meeting now! Dinner (with reservations): $20 STC members/ Students with ID $25 non-members Program Only Attendance (with reservations): $5 for STC; $10 for non-members FREE for students with valid student ID

real-life help solution that is both user-centric and cost-effective. Learn how to easily redesign your online help without changing your existing tools or processes and deliver help content your users will actually use. Marlow and Marc are authorities on designing effective online help systems. They recommend that to successfully help our users, we must first understand what they really want and provide that information when they need it.

We all like pictures. Yet, too often, online help contains way too many screenshots, requiring excessive scrolling which can cause users to get lost, especially if the screenshots are not right on target for what the user is seeking. Online help should have fewer screenshots than paper-based documentation.

Online help design often includes window field definitions, tasks, and reference information single-sourced from large user guides. Although comprehensive, these strategies often leave the user lost in a tangle of “See Also” links.

Users of online help often complain that all they want is a simple answer to a simple question and instead they get an entire manual handed to them. Users find themselves forced to move between several topics within online help to get the complete answer. Often, online documentation is generated from the same printed documentation source. When this happens, the online help ends up being structured in the same sequential reading format as a printed document, which is a practice that doesn’t always work well with online help.

Marlowe Wakeman has fourteen years intechnical communications experience across multiple industries. She currently leads the Information Development Group at BBS Technologies in Houston. Marc Bryant has nine years of software documentation experience developing award-winning help systems using RoboHelp, Flare, and ePublisher Pro.