Designing User-Focused Context Sensitive Help

This pre­sen­ta­tion by Matthew Elli­son [Goog docs] giv­en at last year’s Aus­tralasian Online Doc­u­men­ta­tion and Con­tent Con­fer­ence (AODC 2009) has some excel­lent points on how to craft online help for con­text sen­si­tive calls. This is some­thing Bent­ley uses (a lot) and I’m try­ing to catch up on. There are real­ly a lot of excel­lent points in these slides. I believe that even if you aren’t employ­ing con­text-sen­si­tive help, struc­tur­ing your help as though you were is just as like­ly to get your users to their answers faster.

Also, the slide in this pho­to (from the same con­fer­ence) made me laugh out loud (lit­er­al­ly, not in a LOL sort of way).