I’ve expressed dissatisfaction in the past with the traditional tri-pane help format. I think it’s outdated and has gotten such a bad reputation with computer users that it’s too late to change that. So I think it’s time to find other ways to provide user assistance.

A few weeks ago, I got an email stating I was now being followed on Twitter by @helpburner. I thought this could be another technical writer, and I usually check the tweets of people who follow me anyway. Imagine my interest when Mike Stokes, the owner of this account, had tweets mentioning the beta test of a product called HelpBurner.

The HelpBurner blog entry from May 13th says:

HelpBurner is a new way for web designers and developers to create project documentation, visual how-to’s, tutorials and support material… and we guarantee it will take you at least 50% less time, plus the help created will look beautiful!

And later on:

We think it redefines how help, user guides, tutorials etc are created and more importantly it makes help easy to use and empowering for your users (and did we mention pretty). This can only be a great new step for us all and lead to happier customers and more expert users of our products.

Strong claims of course, and the HelpBurner team is working to meet them. HelpBurner, which appears to be a Silverlight application, is currently in beta, and you can download it by visiting the blog post I linked to above.

I started out a little wary because the initial audience is advertised to be Web developers and designers rather than technical communicators. HelpBurner has promising features, though. Possibly my favorite is the ability to publish in an HTML format that looks like a website instead of tri-pane help. The authoring interface is simple and reminds me a bit of WordPress. My biggest request at this point is to be able to define and apply styles instead of just local formatting, which is currently all the topic editor offers.

If you create user assistance, I encourage you to try HelpBurner out and provide feedback. Mike Stokes, a company representative, is very responsive. I’m not sure when the full release will be, but now’s a great time to try HelpBurner and help make it what you want in a help authoring tool.

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