Good/Bad Help Systems Summary

[Brad Mehlenbacher <brad_m -at- UNITY -dot- NCSU -dot- EDU>]

Hey Folks-->

Sorry to take so long getting the attached messages back to the list.
Thanks to all those who obviously spent many hours composing thoughtful
responses to my original request for information. Hope that the attached
is useful to techwr-l's list-members.... Brad.

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 Brad Mehlenbacher           Phone:     (919) 515-4138
 Assistant Professor         Fax:       (919) 515-1836
 Technical Communication     E-mail:    brad_m -at- unity -dot- ncsu -dot- edu

 English Department          When you are building systems...to get a
 NC State University         physical simulation, what you do is take
 Raleigh, NC 27695-8105      your VR and add constraints to it (Woolley).
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GOOD/BAD EXAMPLES OF ONLINE HELP SYSTEMS: QUERY....

Hi Folks-->I'm currently attempting to put together a course on the
design and evaluation of online help systems, and I'm desparately short
on examples of help systems that exhibit either strengths or weaknesses
in terms of screen design, writing quality, navigatability,
comprehensability, accuracy, ease of use, ease of access, modularity, etc.

If anyone has examples of positive or negative experiences with certain
help systems (preferably commercially-available help systems), I'd really
appreciate your sending me a brief note describing the system and your
particular experience with it.

In exchange, I will happily collect and repost your responses to this
request. Thanks in advance for your time and assistance! Cordially, Brad.

Description of the Respondents:

17 respondents from some of the following institutions: UNM, Stanford,
Clarkson, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Inference
Corporation, U of Washington, Netcom, Carnegie Mellon, Legent Corporation,
GeoQuest, ROLM, Quest Engineering Solutions, MCNC, NWU, Proteon
Corporation, YSU, and FDU.
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I'm taking a Hypertext class at .... Our first assignment was to critique
a help system. We decided MS Word has bad help--since (some) things aren't
alphabetized we couldn't find our way through very easily; sometimes we
had to scroll down several screens to find any useful information; if we
were lucky enough to find info. we couldn't remember where we found it;
and sometimes we returned to the main help menu when we just wanted to go
up a screen. The QuarkXpress help is horrible too. The help is listed by
menu items.  If you want to anchor text together but don't know where the
command is located, you have to search through the whole index. I think
Lotus 1-2-3 has a decent help system. It is context sensitive, so if you
start a command and press the help command a screen concerning the command
appears.

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A help system that I find quite helpful is Microsoft Access's. The Cue
Cards were particularly good. They're about the only tutorial I've ever
found useful, because they step you through work that you want to do, not
through some meaningless exercise that includes twenty things you don't
want to do. In general, I found Access's help quite comprehensive and
quite good at getting you to the right place quickly. By contrast, I found
the help in FrameMaker disappointing. I'm using version 4.0 for Windows.
Probably because the software runs on several different platforms, the
help is not at all like help in other Windows applications. It's done like
a book. To get to any help topic, you need to look through various tables
of contents. Context help works by taking you to the right spot in the
table of contents, rather than by providing text that's really geared to
the context your in. And you search for topics just as you would in an
index for a book. I think it makes very limited use of the resouces online
help can offer. One of my pet peeves is error messages made up only
cryptic programmer-speak, or, even worse, meaningless numbers. I recently
ran into some of those messages in Crosstalk. All they gave you were
numbers that you had to go look up in a long reference list of numbered
help messages.

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I took a graduate course on online documentation at ... (Technical Writing
Program).  The professor was ....  She has since left ..., but I think
she's still a member of the Association for Business Communication, which
you can contact for her contact info. I mention all this, because I think
she got companies to donate their Help systems software for us to test and
evaluate in our lab sessions.  It was a fun course, and we learned a lot.
You might want to consider this approach.

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Hello from the frozen north -- saw one of your postings requesting
good/bad examples of on-line help -- while isn't sophisticated, nor
commercial, one of the most difficult pieces of 'help' (poor descriptor!)
that I've run across for myself is the online manual for UNIX -- it seems
(to me) virtual programmese -- while calling it "bad" hides many
assumptions, for people like myself it isn't useful documentation -and to
that degree, I suppose we can "objectively" call it 'bad'.

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Are you on UNIX and have you ever tried to use the man pages there? I have
been particularly frustrated by these entries because the writers seem to
expect that all users are fairly capable UNIX programmers. In this day and
age, many of us use UNIX systems for communicating, uploading and
downloading information. But we are not accomplished programmers, and the
UNIX man pages don't help much.

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I don't know if you're asking about particular good examples of online
help, but here's one: I like the online help for Corel Draw (for Microsoft
Windows)--nice graphics, good pacing and breakdown of topics.  It was just
what I would have asked for. We're on the point of designing some online
help ourself, here.

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I really dislike the online help of Word for Windows. I find it very
difficult to find out what I want to know. The alphabetical listing is
only available sequentially, not letter-by-letter. It's true that you can
search, but you only get to see a very small subset of the items at a time
due to the size of the screen. (Sometimes you can't remember the name of
the command, but you sorta think you maybe do.)

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Good design in help systems I've seen includes: Supercalc for Windows--as
you move the mouse pointer across screen elements, you can see a brief
summary of what the screen element does displayed on the status bar at the
bottom of the screen. This is the best example of "dynamic" help that I've
seen. Word for Windows has a similar feature--move the pointer over a tool
on the toolbar then press and hold the mouse button. A brief description
of the tool appears in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Poor
design elements: MS Windows products (Word, Mail)---I think the most
frequently-used type of help should go at the top of the menu. But MS, as
a rule, places "Contents" at the top of their help menu. I seldom use
"Contents" even when learning a product. A related negative--what I
normally access in Windows help is search, where you can enter the subject
and display all topics. But to use the search feature in Windows help, a
user must first select an option from the help menu to display a help
panel. Then the user must click the Search button at the top of the panel
to display a Search dialog. Problem: Although search allows a user to
access specific topics quickly, it is inconvenient to access and not
obvious how to use (for the new user). FrameMaker 3.0 for
Windows---Doesn't allow a user to print a help panel.  Always annoying. MS
Word for DOS---It's been a while since I've used this, but I think a user
had to exit to a main help menu everytime he wanted to look up a different
topic.

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This may be a form of heresy but MS Word for Windows is riddled with Bad
examples. A recent incident comes to my mind. Someone here wanted to use
the MS Word Equation Editor to insert a complex equation in a technical
document.  In Winword.Hlp when you look up Equation Editor you get the
following hypertext options:

                Converting an embedded object to text or graphics
                Editing an embedded object

Inserting drawings, charts, equations, wordart text or other imbedded
objects.

Now, of course, the cognoscenti know that Winword treats an equation as an
embedded object, but a lot of users don't know it.  And, of course, the
light might go on in the user's mind, saying "Aha!, an Embedded Object!"
But it usually doesn't. The missing piece seems to be a small section on
"Using Equation Editor" that says something like:

                Go to the Insert Menu
                Select Object
                Select Object Type EQUATION.

This information is included in item #3 in the options offered, but it is
lost in the verbosity surrounding "imbedded object." To me this is a
classic example of how most computer documentation comes across to the
ordinary user as 'user hostile'.  All main-frame, DOS platform anda
surprising amount of MacIntosh documentation suffers for the lack of
simple, clear, complete and useful information. Hence, of course, the
popularity of the series of books entitled: PCs for DUMMIES, INTERNET for
DUMMIES, etc.  The non-expert computer user (and we are all non-experts
when we collide with a new application) is not a DUMMY. The correct title
for this series, in my belief, is PCs for Those Who Feel Like Dummies.

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I like the help system in Microsoft Publisher 2.0, and I demo it often.
Publisher Help is straightforward and cleanly designed.  Publisher itself
is a relatively small and straightforward application, which is one reason
for the straightforward design of the help system. Because Publisher is an
entry-level product, the explanations in the help topics are rather
lengthy, and people can legitimately object to this. On the other hand,
the writers work hard to explain computer and publications concepts to
novices, and this writing is worth looking at. Also, Publisher comes with
Microsoft's Wizards and Cue Cards. Wizards are an alternative user
interface that steps users through tasks, sort of like an automated teller
but with lots of graphics.  Cue Cards are an attempt to provide
tutorial-type instruction while permitting users to get actual work done,
rather than following "canned" examples.

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Well, you've certainly set yourself a project! Please include me in any
posting of your results; I'm partifularly interested because I may have to
teach a course like that myself, in addition to writing some on-line Help.
I think that where most Help systems fall down is not in visible elements
like screen design or writing quality, but in responding to the needs of
each individual user, and I think the nswer is some sort of
customizability. But I'm so frustrated by attempts to get something out of
the Help for various products that I don't stick around long enough to
analyze them much. I like FrameMaker's Help the best of what I've used,
but even then, I quickly get lost because I can't follow *their*
paradigms. I thinks the user should be able to quickly specify which sort
of question he's asking -- to indicate his current mind-set. I haven't
seen facilities like that yet; we're supposed to figure out how a Help
system is organized along with how to find what we want. Lots of
possiblities! I'm going to a 2-day seminar in a few weeks that
concentrates on Micrsosoft help, so I hope to get some more ideas there.

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Here at ... we now find ourselves in not 1 but 2 development environments:
FM 3.0/4.0 and Word 6.0/RoboHELP. Typically, I don't much like Windows
kind of stuff (I like Mac/Sun better), but I'm reasonably impressed with
Windows 6.0 and RoboHELP 2.6. It's reasonably elegant (a big plus in my
book) and straightforward, and I'm going to use RoboHELP to sustain
existing help projects (that I created using the Microsoft Help Compiler,
etc.). RoboHELP just seems to be the best one-stop shopping environment I
know of that'll easily create topics, hot-spots in graphics, and so on.
I'm less impressed with FM 4.0's hypertext tools (even though my biases
would normally be with FM).

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I'm working on a presentation on Writing Helpful Help in which I will give
some examples of help systesm with problems. After my presentation, I will
send you a copy of the notes.

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Access an index of commands and topics in addition to the main menu, which
lists general categories.  From each help screen you can go back to the
Index, Main Menu, and a Shortcuts menu.  Each menu shows a list of topics;
you choose a topic or word to see information on that.  A list appears in
the right side of the help window with a list of other related topics. In
the index, the alphabet appears across each screen.  You can choose a
letter in this alphabet to go to that section of the index. This help
utility is well-designed because the information can be referenced in
different ways, and accessing the appropriate information can be done
quickly.  It's definitely worth checking out.

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At the recent ...  tech writing meeting in ..., a woman from a online help
product company told us that Microsoft had found out that users of Windows
rarely or never used the on-line help. I think she said that over 80%
don't use online help! Microsoft may change this in the Cairo Windows. And
then again, they probably won't. I write on-line documentation. But I
never read the stuff when using other programs. The feature which I do use
is help's SEARCH; i only vaguely have to remember what i'm looking for
(usually tables of codes, such as what do i press to get a tab in
search/replace fields (^t). So I would recommend a very global, very loose
search ability.

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Parsons Technology's Money Counts for Windows has a particularly nice,
graphical help file you can look at.  Call me if you need a copy.

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I'm not a big fan of stand-alone help systems, e.g., grammar and style
checkers. They're too arbitrary for me or my students. Just when I'm
trying to undo the Fiddich dictum about Never Starting a Sentence with a
Conjunction; the style checker tells me that It is preferable not to start
a sentence with "And." On the other hand, I do appreciate the good help
features that come with some programs.  My particular favorite is
Pagemaker's Help.  It's easy and fast to navigate and tells me what I
can't remember, or need to know, in less time than it would take me to
look it up. Spell checkers should be a must in any writing lab.  Some
misguided souls believe they should be disabled to force students to
figure the spelling out for themselves.  My research suggests that for
students who can't spell, the dictionary may not help.  But the
spellchecker's playing around with the letters gets them where they need
to be.  Thesauruses are probebly good for the students who would never use
a Roget's, but I find the ones I've seen limited.

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Ah, if you could have been a fly on the wall when I telephoned bug reports
about online help to WordPerfect Corporation. WordPerfect pre 6.0 help was
terrific.  I learned to use WordPerfect by reading the help screens. When
I upgraded to 6.0 and tried to use online help, I predicted the feature
would bring the company to its knees. WordPerfect 6.0 online help was the
first feature in any software package that made me want to put my fist
through a screen. The hypertext circle is worse than a dead end. I had
forgotten the keystrokes for a function I needed to use.  The function was
not exotic.  I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the information
with 6.0 online help -- without success. Eventually I figured out the
keystrokes (I think I loaded 5.1 and used the help), but I was furious
about the time I wasted in the new and improved help. I called WordPerfect
support.  The technician could not find the function in the help system.
He told me the keystrokes to use to perform the function. I told him I had
figured out the keystrokes - I was reporting a bug in help. Although he
agreed that the topic should have appeared on the help screen, he was
reluctant to accept my complaint. He had trouble understanding that I
expected help to be consistent in the help it provides. He did take my
name and telephone number and treated my complaint like other bug
complaints that went beyond the first tier of support. Along with bug
reports about indexing features, tables, and other features, I continued
to call in bug reports about help.