Published on Wednesday, January 31 2007
This post over at 37signals blog made me think about how designing a helpful help system should be very much one if the priorities for anyone developing a system whcih is to be used by anyone else [1]. In the comments i said:
What is lacking sometimes (most of the times?) is a good“help” design. I mean that “helping the users” should be integral tothe design of your application and be treated as a first-class elementas much as the rest.
For me a good help (or manual, or …) should have these:
- be helpful (tell me how to do something, not the why of a feature, and don’t give me too options),
- be contextual (help me on what I’m doing now),
- educate (let me know me that i can do more, but don’t shout at me that I’m a newbie),
- be self revealing (complex features of the systemshould not get into the way of the simplest uses, which I’ll need mostof the time, but they should appear evident to the advanced users)
[1] I think that it should be done even if you will be the only one to use it, but this is an edge case…
technorati tags:37signals, help, design
Published on Tuesday, January 23 2007
As a response to Dave Winer’s post on the subject, Marc Canter gives us a view or rather a description of a dream-coming-true of software that works connecting together the informations from your family and your network of friends, collegues and relatives aggregating your digital lifestyle into one place and in the end giving you more power and more freedom to enjoy it.
… Its an ID hub, it implements structured blogging like podcasting,
vlogging, reviews, events, etc. – and it has a robust, state-of-the-art
social networking available in white label form. …
What I’m dreaming of for the businesses shares much of this view where in the end you will be able to aggregate and use the data and connections generated by your enterprise, and your network of suppliers, and customers, and employees in a simple and hassle-free way. This will help you manage your processes with agility and will give you more freedom and more power to concentrate to the fundamentals of what you are doing. We’ll see more and more the emergence of DLAs dedicated to manage you enterprise data, and this will change the way we see business applications
I think we could call these Digital Worklife Aggregators …
P.S. I admit that being a reader of both Marc and Dave for some years now, I might have been influenced by their writings more than a bit
technorati tags:wikierp, business, DLA, DigitalLifestyleAggregator
