I’m really interested to find out of anyone has made a jquery plugin to add help overlays that can be attached to float next to items on the webpage.
The idea would be that when you click a help button (or when the page first loads) the page dimms and overlaid over key elements are descriptive text that explain what these key features of the page do. Ideally there could even be a step through process so that you can illustrate the features one a time with a next/back navigation showing somewhere.
Lovely examples of these can found in Gmail now. A shot is at the top of this page: http://blogs.clariusconsulting.net/kzu/documenting-user-interfaces-in-a-mouse-less-touch-ui/
They aren’t using jquery and I assume hard coded these. If anyone knows of a flexible jquery plugin that can do this or something similar magically by just specifying the object ids in your page please do share.
I would recommend using jQuery Joyride which is an extremely flexible tour/help plugin. You can set up a “tour” of your site, or have overlay effects with help popups, or customize and create your own effects/functions to achieve what you desire.