In a recent post, I talked about having documentation design reviews. Yesterday, I showed my team a new project I’m working on. I was trying out a new approach, the idea behind which was good. But the team’s feedback helped me turn it into something better—and visually simpler.

My approach to this new context-sensitive help system consisted of having a sidebar on each page entitled “How Do I…?” It contained tasks that the user may want to know how to do on the associated screen. The names of the tasks were dropdown hotspots that exposed instructions. The main body of each help topic consisted of the nitty-gritty descriptions of the page’s functionality.

A fundamental problem lay in the fact that the sidebar and the body competed with each other for attention. Since users typically pop the help system open looking for task instructions, I wanted that content easily accessible. But until they get used to the help, users may not know where to look at first for the information they want.

In our discussion, we arrived at the approach of dividing the help into two main sections. I call them “Screen Help” and “Task Help.” The Screen Help section consists of the CSH topics, and the Task Help section consists of task-based topics, one for each task that previously was going to sit in the sidebar.

Each CSH topic has a section near the top entitled “Relevant Tasks” with a list of links to the corresponding task topics. The task topics have a section called “Related Tasks” with links to the rest of the topics in its group. This makes for much simpler topics without competing chunks of content.

The design review was very productive for me and the rest of the team. We can use this forum to see what the rest of the team is working on, and it helps our creativity come out as we help each other solve problems. I get the benefit of others’ good ideas. If you work in an organization that does not enforce design on you, I recommend holding documentation design reviews so each team member benefits from the team’s collective experience.

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