To get the most out of Help and online documentation for a website or software product, consider your users and the types of Help that are most useful in the context of the product or site's use.  Begin thinking, discussing and researching the Help system at the beginning of the product lifecycle. 

When to Address Help

Too often, when companies are developing a product or website, they wait until the last minute to think about the kinds of Help and online documentation users will need. This is a costly mistake, when you consider that the costs of online or within-system help are significantly lower than the cost of live phone support.

Mean cost of service request (source: Help Desk Institute).

According to Forrester Research, providing service via the telephone costs $33 per incident and answering email costs $10. Web-based self-service is a bargain at $1/incident. The following table shows Forrester's industry estimates for several different channels.

Incorporating the right kinds of online Help for your product can significantly lower overall support costs. Below are some tips and techniques for designing online help that can answer your users' questions—before they pick up the phone.

Know your users

Is the majority of your user base already familiar with your product or similar products within the specific domain, or are they new users? Is the technology platform (web, java, etc.) recognizable to the users? Is there domain-specific language users need to know to complete their tasks?

Knowing the answers to these questions is a key to determining what kinds of online Help users might need. For example, if the product or site contains language that is industry- or domain-specific, you’ll likely need field-level help for labels and terms users might not know.

Include discussions of the Help System early in the development process

Determining the kinds of online Help you need should take place in tandem with early system and architecture design, since these components and their behavior are really part of the technical design. For example, a truly useable FAQ page may require some data mining from a technical support database to determine what the top questions are. The system should automatically update FAQs as the most frequent—and most expensive—questions change throughout the product lifecycle.

Determine types of Help needed

The following is a list of different types of help and when they might prove most useful.

Welcome message Welcome messages are short messages users may get when they first launch the product or go to the website. They may include an overview of new features, links to guided tours for help with specific tasks, or short tips to increase efficiency. Quicken and TurboTax provide good examples of using welcome messages. Searchable Help For any product or site with any level of complexity, searchable Help is a must. For some systems—especially websites—FAQs may provide enough content, as long as they are easily searchable and scannable.  Contextual, page-level Help Contextual, page-level Help answers the question “What can I do on this page?” In many instances, too much contextual Help is a sure sign of a system that needs to be redesigned to improve usability.  Field-level Help If the product or system incorporates language and terminology that users may not know, field-level Help will provide novice users with the information they need without too much interruption from the task they are currently working on. Make sure any field labels or terms that have clickable or hover Help are visually distinct.  Step-by-step guides If you use step-by-step guides, be careful how you design them. Microsoft makes a cardinal mistake in Excel of showing them in another window—which promptly disappears when users click back on the task pane. In general, step-by-step guides are useful for complex tasks that are done infrequently.  FAQs FAQs can answer questions about system usage, as well as more general questions about business processes, billing, etc. Consider how you chunk the information in FAQs so that content is organized for efficient scanning and searching. Glossary Remember that use of Help likely interrupts users in the middle of a task. Some sites or products do warrant glossaries, but showing field-level Help when and where it applies to a task is usually a better option. Guided tours Guided tours are a good way to promote the usage of new features for upgraders or to show most common features to new users.  Contact us There will always be cases where users can’t find the answer to a question within the product or site. Give users access to email and/or phone numbers so they can escalate problems.

Test your system--and your online Help--with users throughout the lifecycle

Too often, when companies are developing a product or website, they wait until the last minute to think about the kinds of Help and online documentation users will need. This is a costly mistake, when you consider that the costs of online or within-system help are significantly lower than the cost of live phone support.

A goal of any system is to be as easy to use as possible. Conducting user research early and often will allow you to fix many usability issues and reduce the need for Help within the product. But make sure you also budget for testing the Help system itself, to ensure that users' questions are answered before they pick up the phone.

Want more information on Help and Online Documentation? Contact Expero to conduct a tutorial for your company, or to schedule a research project.