Onlinedocs

Going WAAAAAAAAY back to Dr. Tesdell's question about why we have help, I don't think it's that people are not smart enough to figure things out. Tools, machines, etc... generally seem to be designed in such a way that people, after messing with them long enough, can figure out how to do what they want to do with them. By playing around with the tools, a person assimilates the new concepts to previously encountered ones and can begin figuring out how to use the tools. I think Help, when it comes down to the very bottom, is really a method of exponentially decreasing the amount of time such process would normally take. On the other hand, some products are just worthless and no amount of messing around with them will uncover ANYTHING - so Help is a poor method of redeeming the lousy product.

Before we start creating help documents of various kinds I guess we need to answer a very basic question: Why help? In other words, aren't people smart enough to figure out how to make devices and tools work without a document that tells them how to do it? What's the problem?

Jennifer picked out a good instruction set. It's simple and well-written. I wonder what your comments are about the help topic Send Newsletter Email? Would you change anything? I think the visual element in this help system is interesting too. What do you think?

http://e-beans.scullyinteractive.com/index.php?p=134#
I thought this one was great because it's "compact," is mainly task oriented, is layered, has related topics listed, and is consistent in the way elements are formatted.

Welcome to Onlinedocs. Let's start with an example of a good online help document. Publish a link for the rest of us to look at. This example of Macromedia help is interesting. What do you like/not like about it?