Re: (no subject)

["Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>]

>The reason users use help as a last resort, is that help is generally
almost
>USELESS to users who are not skilled at picking the search terms that the
>help creator used. 

I've seen the same thing for a search engine on a website. People use all
kinds of weird queries. Seems like it is very hard to make a search for
non-programmers.

Fuzzy matching, rewrite engines, synonnyms, etc can be of very much help at
this point.

>Another reason
>that users use help as a 'last resort' is that there is a fairly good
chance
>that what they want to do may not be explained in the Help.

Perhaps if it could be possible to make help systems that actually tried to
compile lists of relevant queries, then a much better help system could be
created.

IRC channels? I don't belive this will work. They (users) will get an
answare
but not within acceptable time limits. It could allthough be used as a means
to
build initial frameworks for a better help system.

>The third
>reason is that help does not necessarily explain the answer in such a way
>that the user can understand.

On one website people asked about information the website provided but in
some other form. Most of the time they used words of theire own or
profession
that was not the words used on the site.

Seems like it is necessary to use a translation engine or rewrite engine to
change words and even insert paragraphs as the user is more or less skilled.

>Tom M

Perhaps... Imagine some kind of web-faq where qualified persons could
easilly
fill in answares to questions collected from help systems.. With sections
for
keywords, different languages, different skill levels..

>From this a transcript could be generated that would be the actual help
system.

John