Help: How helpful is it?

I read on Usable Help:

"According to the 2002 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, about 50% of the US adults studied demonstrate literacy skills at Type 1 or Type 2 levels. This means that respondents are, at best:

"[A]pt to experience considerable difficulty in performing tasks that required them to integrate or synthesize information from complex or lengthy texts or to perform quantitative tasks that involved two or more sequential operations and in which the individual had to set up the problem."



Gordon said even if you wrote in simple sentences the basic DNA of help, text and sequential steps make it difficult for adults to use help.

Me thinks that a combination of graphic content (video, flash) and succint text (where it is needed) can help.

Glossword offers an alternative version of help: Video Help - just watch and do! But this is not feasible for bigger projects.

update 14 November 2003

Viewlets probably are a solution to ensure your users understand and act; but you see most of it depends on who your user is. For a geek a text file would do. For a normal user you may consider html or pdf. For people of Type 1 and Type 2 you may want to look at Viewlets. Qarbon, manufaturers of Viewlet builders claim:

"ViewletBuilder's innovative content creation process has revolutionized the way in which software is presented and demonstrated. The history of online demos can quite literally be divided into a pre-Viewlet era and the post-Viewlet era. Before ViewletBuilder introduced its ground-breaking screen-capture animation process to the world in 1998, application demos tended to be lengthy “movie” files, which were difficult to edit and virtually impossible to update. Today, ViewletBuilder's patented content creation mechanism allows users to take a series of completely editable screen captures that are then animated to produce a flawless Flash simulation."

But I would rather wait and watch. the very fact that it involves Flash makes me wary. What if some of my users don't have flash plugins in their browsers? And I was testing the viewlet demos on qadron's site; I am not too happy with the time each Viewlet took to download. So, That's that.

Note: Glossword is an amazing open-source tool that enables collaborative dictionary/glossary building; it is a browser based product. You should give it a spin; I found it to be of great help.


write to me: Suman@sumankumar.com