Help systems

From MobileDesign

I'm unaware of any help tool similar to RoboHelp really focusing on mobile delivery. I'm also aware that most help systems for mobiles are, at best, bad. So it's normally roll-it-yourself, or more commonly, do without.

[edit] Database

We normally create a database or spreadsheet of help topics, and do the following:

• Be sure that the user tasks for each screen are represented. For example, a person looking at an email message might be interested in replying, deleting, forwarding,

• As necessary, add flags. For example, viewing video might be relevant only to some devices and you would flag some topics as explicitly video supported, and others (explaining why there's no video) as explicitly not video supported. These will be incorporated into your device detection and development strategy.

• Ideally, add tags. These will be topics, search terms, etc.

• Each topic has a very short 2-4 word title, a wordy title that hints at the answer, a 1-2 paragraph summary, and a full content help. Content is written to link both to other help topics AND to relevant parts of the application or site.

• As necessary, translate into other languages.

[edit] Displaying

For each page in the site or application, we provide "contextual help" – we select the relevant topics from above and provide the long-title version, typically linked (link, menu item, whatever) as a separate page. Note that this page provides a good chunk of the help you might need without going further.

There is also an application-wide help page. This contains some getting started type topics, search, and so forth. This page shows the short titles.

The contextual help page also provides a help search.

A help topic displays the 1-2 paragraph summary (with pictures as useful), and either more below some separator, more revealed, or more on a separate page.