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User assistance

Write user documentation and design its behaviour

User assistance stands for the documentation that is provided to the user in order to help him/her in accomplishing tasks. It is important to match the documentation to the users of the product and to make it as accessible as possible. Documentation is either declarative or procedural and can be provided in different forms: manual, reference guide, online help, hints, inline help, contextual help, e-learning, training documentation…

user support materials

The design and writing of user assistance is a kind of process in its own. For matching the documentation to the product users, the writer needs to have a good idea about who the users are, where they might encounter any problems and which form of help would provide the best support. This requires a special focus during the field study and results in the specification of a documentation strategy.

From a design point-of-view it might be interesting to first consider several alternatives to provide help, test or evaluate these concepts and then refine them. Conceiving user assistance thus also is an iterative process, where e.g. users have a say in the evaluation of the material which is fine-tuned based on their feed-back.

Important aspects for user assistance are

  • the structure of the documentation (task-oriented or feature-oriented)
  • the applied writing style (natural or formal)
  • its presentation (information design)
  • the interactive behaviour (when and how does the documentation need to be available?)
Effort: 

The effort for designing and writing user assistance is mainly influenced by

  • the complexity of the application or device the assistance applies to
  • the volume of the support materials to be produced

An important and often forgotten aspect is the maintenance of the documentation. Software products evolve quite intensively and the effort for keeping the documentation in line with the most recent version of the product is significant.

If user assistance is to be produced, it preferably is conceived as from the start of the design project, so it can fully be integrated with the product. Furthermore designing e.g. the help en the user interface in parallel can result in additional iterations: writing documentation assumes critical evaluation and provides ideas for improving the design.

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