A reader sent me Cherryleaf - Article - nine trends in online user assistance

There are places where I think they are right on:

"Applications can suffer from Help windows being placed in inconvenient locations -- often covering the portion of the interface on which the user is working. You can embed Help into the application and make information viewable as part of the application window itself. "

Contextual help that prevents errors is some of the most useful help you can provide. Contextual help that appears in close proximity to an error or problem is the next best help you can provide. Context is a key to understanding, proximity for relevence... it's just good.

Other things in the article I found a bit wonky: "This movement towards organizations creating customizable products and services is likely to create a need for personalized and customizable user documentation that is quick and cheap to produce."

I"m moderately certain they are suggesting allowing customers to customize help. I reread it a couple times, and I'm feeling pretty confident this is the point (it's a bit less clear than some other sections)

If that is true, it's a bad idea. My experience with customization and personalization is that it is highly task-context sensitive.

Customizing a personal homepage is perceived as useful by users, customizing a help page is not. The users I've seen would first prefer not to go to help at all (under any circumstance, once the reasons contextual help is so much better than documentation-style help) BUT if they do you go help they want to go in, find the answer and get out as fast as possible. No lingering over whether their headers should be sea green or sky blue, just "get me my frigging answer now please."

Personalization in shopping is good... but I shudder to think what personalization might do in help-- imagine the user seeing related help to a problem they had once before "Hey, why does the help keep telling em that? Sure, I goofed up once, but I figured it out! Why does this program hate me?"

Okay, that might be a bit excessive. But still... i think product managers should be wary of trends in design. Just because the industry is excited about this or that cool feature, doesn't mean your product should do it too.

Anyhow, lots to think about in this article.

Upon reading Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines (Alertbox Feb. 2003)

"In recent studies on how employees in a range of companies use their intranets, an important guideline emerged: intranets should provide a dedicated search box for finding phone numbers and other employee directory information. Preferably, this employee directory box should appear on every page of the intranet, and it should definitely appear on the top levels of an enterprise portal and on the main intranet homepage.
That's one usability guideline.
At the same time, one of the most established usability guidelines for search is to provide no more than a single search box on the homepage. Competing homepage search boxes are confusing, and advanced search should be relegated to a secondary position inside the site to avoid seducing users away from the simple search, which they're more likely to use correctly.
That's another, conflicting, usability guideline. "

Mr. Nielsen goes on to be puzzled as to what to do, and resolves it by recommending emperical thinking and human observation. I think he's talking about design....

About a year ago, when Nielsen's book on homepages came out, a friend told me his employer's site was 90% compliant, and 100% unusable. How were the guidelines useful in redesigning that page?

I've also heard it said guidelines are helpful for beginner designers, before they get experience.

You know what? I think beginner designers are the ones who should be kept away from guidelines, as far as possible. Instead, they should work on looking at usable designs, and designing, and seeing their designs tested and retested (in the words of the great homer simpson, "lather rinse repeat. always repeat.").

ON the Yahoo intranet homepage, we've got a search box, a dropdown with "employee, text, and conference room" as the choices and a submit button. Occasionally I make a mistake and search for text in the employee database, but 9 times out of ten, I'm looking up an employee and for the odd times I'm looking for a form or a policy, I do usually catch the dropdown before my pinkie makes a dive for the enter key (they have a mind of their own, those digits).

Still better would be to run queries against each database and return answers from each, rather like amazon does... most of the time amazon knows if you are searching for a book or a CD, and when they don't, they offer you choices from each category. Why not apply this tidy solution to the intranet problem?

This is called design. Thinking about a problem, and thinking up answers by looking at the world around us: design. Blindly adhering to guidelines is not design. Looking at guidelines and comparing them to the world and deciding if they are applicable to your unique situation: design.

Don't get me wrong, I think guidelines are valuable. Often I come up against a usability problem and say to myself, "Hey it's a proximity problem" and can fix it easily. But those guidelines have meaning to me because they represent compressed experience.

A guideline-- such as "Place related items in close proximity to each other"-- is simple a mnemonic for the hundreds of times I've seen users in a lab not notice something because it's on the other side of the page from the thing they were looking at. The guideline really falls down when the subtleties of the rule are revealed... I've noticed that a line between two items is a hard divider for the user's eyes. One might think that the proximity rule would keep this problem from happening-- if they are close, they are associated, right? But I know proximity isn't just physical space, but also visual structure of that space. A line between two items is the same to a user's perception of relatedness as an inch of whitespace.

When I worked on the book, I tried to get around the problem for guidelines needing context by using lots of examples and stories. But I wonder if this can make up for the value of watching users use your designs.

I would say if you are a junior designer the three things you can do to become great are:

1. Look at great design. Collect books, use other people's websites that have been earmarked as good but also winning book and industrial design, visit museums. All media is relevant.

2. Watch every single session of usability testing you can, no matter how redundant the problems may seem. Sometimes the fifth user will suddenly surprise you. Take notes (it will help keep your attention high) and sketch little design solution-ideas to the problems you see in the margins of those notes.

3. Design all the time. Design for fun, design for work. Design a homepage, Design a page for your mom, your sister, your favorite charity... design design design.

And above all, take every guideline with a grain of salt. A guideline is a starting place, not an ending place for thinking. Ask yourself questions after reading an Alertbox-- "Why would a dedicated search box for employee search be valuable? Maybe that is the most common type of search. Hey, maybe I'll check the logs. Hey, maybe I'll interview some employees, and see what they search for. Hey, maybe I can design it this way....." then test and watch.

Mr. Nielsen says "The usability field is one in which empirical observation and theoretical analysis reinforce each other."

I'd add that the design field is one where thought and empathy lead to more satisfying products. Guidelines are useful when the reference thinking, but dangerous when they shut it down.

Thanks for your well wishes, all. I'm on the road to wellness. The fever is gone, and all that remains is an annoying cough and exhaustion. I'm trying to get caught up at work now, but I'll be blogging again soon enough.

I'm sick like I haven't been in years.

I didn't think you could make a good movie from a handful of letters between an ecentric new york writer and a english bookseller.

I was wrong. 84 Charing Cross Road (1986)

What do you do when you are working on a project that takes every ounce of your brainpower? And by seven o'clock you are a shattered shell of your former self?

Go home and read comics.

Tom Strong helped me rediscover my inner gee-whiz golly self.

Compelling story, beautiful illustration, skilled writing, puzzling ending... well worth a read or four: Murder Mysteries

"Oh man.. if ye are not always decent, at least you are consistant..."

from Wired News: NASA: No Debris Sales on EBay

"NASA warned members of the public Sunday against trying to sell purported Columbia debris on eBay... Hours after the shuttle broke up Saturday over Texas, raining smoking debris over the countryside, listings for pieces began appearing on the Internet auction site. "

from On the Art of Writing
specifically from the section On Jargon.

"Has a Minister to say "No" in the House of Commons? Some men are constitutionally incapable of saying no: but the Minister conveys it thus "The answer to the question is in the negative." That means "no." Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except that the speaker is a pompous person?"

I came across this delight because today I ventured into a library and suddenly started reading 84 Charing Cross Road and realized I was going to read the whole thing standing there and how long had I been standing there and where was my husband anyhow?

I found Philippe in the photography section, and since we couldn't check anything out from that particular library (our residential status is insufficiantly documented), he went to take pictures with a kite, and I went to a bookstore. I couldn't find 84 Charing Cross at that particular book store (though let me comfort you by saying I did find it three bookstores later, not that I spent my day going from bookstore to bookstore -- they were on they way as I did my chores I swear).

I was lucy enough to find Q's legasy at Bookbuyers which introduced me to Ms. Helene's introduction to "proper writing," Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (what a face-- he knows things); and while Amazon is kind enough to charge me extra for looking for it, whammo, it happens to be free on bartleby's.

Whaddya know.

This information wants to be free: The Online Books Page

I'm wondering which RSS Reader I should adopt.