Good help vs bad help

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:

1. be helpful (tell me how to do something, not the why of a feature, and don’t give me too options),
2. be contextual (help me on what I’m doing now),
3. educate (let me know me that i can do more, but don’t shout at me that I’m a newbie),
4. 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