RE: (no subject)

["Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentstar com>]

>Perhaps there is a feeling of the humans vs. the computers?  Asking the
>computer for help is defeat, but asking for a human to help the person
>fight the computer isn't?  How is the request worded?  Or, are they
>asking someone they trust?

They are generally phrased

'Help! How do I ...? What do I do to ...?  I need to ... ?  Is there a way
to ...?  Where can I find ...?'
I've asked the users, generally they ask me because its much quicker and
more convenient to ask me.  They find the searching to be frustrating
because they either take forever to find what they want, or don't find what
they want at all, whereas asking me almost always gets an immediate and
(usually) correct answer.  If help were easier to use and less time
consuming, they would likely use help instead.

>I agree that searching in help is difficult.o
>
>One very useful and difficult thing to do is to add help that says,
>if you were trying to do this "obviously unrelated" thing, go _here_.
>Doing this well requires collecting data carefully, though, I think.
>
>Adding a "related operations" button that says, e.g. on the save as
>dialogue, "can't see the format you're looking for? try _export to_
>or the _format manager_", muight help.  Or it might just lead to
>more frustration as people go around helplesly in circles until their
>office chairs explode.
>
>Lee

I agree that context sensitive help would definitely be useful.  In another
thread I suggested a tool for logging feature and application usage.  By
finding the correlations between usage of different features, it should be
fairly trivial to determine what features should be grouped/are used
together and what features should/are not.  I'd also like to gather a bit of
demographic info, because certain subsets of features are likely to be used
with certain groups of users.  (This is readily apparent for tools that are
contained in office suites where only 10% of functionality is common to all
users, and then another 10% varies according to the user group demographic
and then they find the other 80% of the functionality to be almost useless.)

A related operations button is interesting although as you say it may end up
with users going in circles and hence even more frustrated...

Tom M.
TomM pentstar com