Re: Ideas for Help 2.0

[Rick Stone <rstone75 -at- kc -dot- rr -dot- com>]

I'm with others on the description of the help. When I read that I 
groaned inside. Why? Because "kickass" is such a subjective term. What 
is "kickass" to one person would make another fall asleep.

When I see things like this, entropy comes to mind.

I once had some "help" when management felt I was overwhelmed with my 
own help system. I've no clue how they managed to arrive at that idea. 
It certainly didn't come from me. But be that as it may, I was suddenly 
tasked with teaching two other individuals how to create help pages. One 
was great and did exactly as I asked. The other decided to "enhance" his 
own pages as he discovered the wonders of Dynamic HTML. His pages were 
rife with objects spinning and twirling and flashing into view. It was a 
visual nightmare. Sure, it danced and sang. But it conveyed no useful 
information whatsoever. Whatever information was there was obscured by 
all the "whiz bang" features.

To me, a truly "kickass" help system is one that doesn't get in my way 
and provides me with EXACTLY the information I need in order to get my 
job done. Adobe's new "Community Help" fails big time in that respect. 
Sure, it has lots of features. One can add comments and even rate 
things. Wheee! but it takes about a minute to load when you summon help 
and it only offers help in the form of "This switch does this. That 
switch does that." There is very often nothing inside it that is truly 
useful for someone seeking answers.

So sure, build in all the "kickass" features you like. But don't be 
surprised to discover later that the "help", has a new first step. Open 
the browser and head to Google...

Cheers... Rick :)

On 1/11/2012 8:34 AM, Steve Schwarzman wrote: