I’m in the process of developling various applications for whom the end users are both engineers and salesman. Some of the operations and options may not be immediately obvious to all users. All applications are delivered with a PDF and paper manual – but of course nobody reads them!
I would like to improve the usability of the applications by including dynamic context sensitive help. One option would be alá MSDN and have F1 call up a web page – however internet access will not always be available and even this will be too much effort for some.
Another idea is to have descriptions pop up when an option is hovered over – like a tooltip.
I’m interested in other peoples views on this and what are best practices in this situation.
Along a similar theme to this post What are common UI misconceptions and annoyances? I’d like to start a discussion regarding these two points:
What would be the best way to go about it?
What help features in existing applications you use either delight or annoy you..?
In my experience nobody but programmers reads the help. So when you have a technical and non-technical target audience you end up providing 2 ways of doing everything:
A Wizard with a few options.
A property editor with lots of options.
In either case, pictures are usually better than words for documentation. So a screenshot or 3 with big green arrows and circles calling out what does what will go a lot further than an indexing, exhaustive help file.