How to alert users to permissible values?

["Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Lisa Cressey is <<...writing the help for an application ... [with]
data entry fields that have been assigned very specific valid
values.>>

The developers' response that it takes a lot of extra work to build
in support for "What's This? Help" may or may not be correct, but
it's still lazy. If you can get a manager to agree with you that this
user assistance is an important feature of the interface, try to get
it implemented. If not:

<<Another developer within the company suggested expanding the use of
the Status Bar and show the valid values there, but the development
team is crying because it does not comply with Microsoft guidelines
for status bar help.>>

I dislike status bars because I tend to ignore them, and all kinds of
weird and occasionally important things show up there that I never
remember to look for. I'm not alone in this dislike based on my
limited and thus very anecdotal personal observations. One way to
resolve this is to build the permitted data directly into the dialog
box itself (i.e., use affordances). For example, if a field currently
says "year", change it to read "year (use four digits)" or "year
(format = YYYY)" or something similar.

That's a good start, but let's look at what you want to accomplish
here. Really, there are two things you're trying to do: to let users
know what values they can enter, and to explain to them why they've
made an error when they input invalid data. That being the case, I
can suggest two other parallel strategies that should work. First,
implement context-sensitive help that lets users pop up the section
of the online help for that specific dialog box or form. Make it very
clear in that section of the help what the permitted values are for
each field, and make it easy for users to find that information when
the help window opens. (I do this by implementing a mini table of
contents for each dialog box; here, one link would be entitled "what
are the legal values for each field?" or something similar.) Second,
because the data fields obviously have some kind of error checking on
them, you can use that to your advantage without making the
developers sweat. When users enter incorrect data, they'll typically
see an error message that says something like "invalid data"...
and nothing else. Don't stop there! Change the error message to
read "invalid data: this field only accepts values between 10 and
20. Please replace the current number with a number in this range".

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Microsoft Word: It grows on you... but with a little fungicide,
you'll be feeling much better real soon now!"--GH


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