June 30, 2005
Designing and developing Help systems
We’re developing a new web-based call center application from the ground up. What considerations should we keep in mind as we design the Help functionality?
Kudos to you for thinking about the Help system at the beginning of the project. 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.
Creating usable and useful Help follows the same approach that we recommend for a product. Know your users, test and validate Help designs with them, and evaluate your success post-launch. Expero has a short paper on Help and Online Documentation which provides information on things to consider during development, as well as guidelines and examples of types of Help and Online Documentation. Contact us for a free copy of the paper.
