Designing Effective Online Help

Creating short topics

While short sentences make it easier for users to learn new concepts, short topics make new users feel more comfortable with the learning process. Let's face it, if you look at a body of text and it looks long, you'll grimace and avoid reading it. I did that quite frequently when I was in college. The same body of text broken up into smaller sections tricks users into thinking they're not reading as much. The current article is a perfect example. Take a look at this article contained on a single page. It's pretty daunting.

A daunted user is an unhappy user. They'll sooner call up tech support and complain about the product before reading the online help if it looks like an excerpt from War and Peace. Some people say that you shouldn't have more than 10 lines of text per topic. The rule I try to follow is to make sure users don't have to use their vertical scroll bar too much (though I break this rule on several of my web pages).

I should mention here that when you're producing online help, be sure you don't force your users to use the horizontal scroll bar. It makes reading difficult and time consuming. Plus, it's just plain annoying. The best way to avoid the horizontal scroll bar is to define a size for the online help window and produce everything so that it fits into that space. If you have to use graphics that are larger than the online help window, you might want to use a popup link that appears in a secondary window.