I don’t think online help is the wave of the future—it’s more the wave of the past—but I’m still always trying to keep my brain open to ideas for improving it.

I attended a meeting today with the folks I work with in a project portfolio. Our portfolio manager reviewed what the group accomplished in 2009 and showed us what’s coming up this year, including the goals the managers cooked up.

One of the developers demonstrated an application his team built for their customers to use in accessing content in a MarkLogic database. Of course, the application featured robust searching because of indexing and tagging.

This got me asking myself: What if online help could be configured to be context-sensitive in a different way than usual? What if, when the user launches the help system, instead of opening to some assigned help topic, it instead runs a preprogrammed search on keywords assigned to that topic? Then the results display in the help window, and the user can scan the results and choose where to start? Basically, can anticipatory search be done, and would it be helpful?

One possible downfall of this is that instead of being presented with some content, increasing the chance that the user won’t have to click around to find what he wants, some extra clicks are in fact required before finding answers. But many people are accustomed to search engines, where answers aren’t presented anyway. The user has to search first.

Some may say, “Isn’t that what an index is for? Essentially a keyword-based search?” I don’t think so. Indexes are something of a relic, a leftover from the days when the only ways to find information in a manual were the table of contents in the front and the index in the back. Further, online help indexes refer to topics, but they don’t give context. A good search engine does provide context in the results so the user can sift out irrelevance before clicking.

It would be interesting to try out something like this and then test it with users. Software like the Adobe Creative Suite opens its help to a search page, but of course you have to perform a search. The specific software you’re using doesn’t know which feature you want information about. I’m probably thinking more about Web apps, where you’re looking at a specific screen, so I imagine you could pass some keywords to the help and run a search.

If anyone is already doing something like this, I’d like to hear how it’s going.

Related entries (auto-generated):

A Shift in My Context-Sensitive Help Approach

Help Authoring Woes: Index As You Go

Results of a Team Design Review: A Different Context-Sensitive Help Structure

Write Self-Contained Titles to Preserve Context

Usability and Maintainability: Navigable Information