User Interface Blog

Jensen Harris observed in his latest blog entry that in usability studies the Help is mostly used by expert users.

Yet, in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help.

Jensen lists a few issues for that:

• Only expert uses know the right keywords for looking something up.
• Often it is designed to troubleshoot not to teach a software.
• People learn software throughplaing with it, they rarely notice the help system.

Jensen also note in his blog entry that “…if you’re authoring your help system for newcomers, you might be designing for the wrong kind of person”. Is this valid for Online - Help in applications available on the market today or is this only valid for the MS-Office products? Is the current Online - Help system that we have today really not used by novice users?