I love the LinkedIn forums. Once you wade a few past sales pitches and “Hey look at me!” posts, you often find some useful information. The world is fast-paced and ever-changing, but I still subscribe to the “nugget” of information approach to learning. I can only take in so much at one time, after all!
Today’s nugget: a link to a Gallery of iPhone Help. There you see help in panels, menus of help, help with nice layout and design, all the bells and whistles — and a couple fails.
My Epic Fail award goes to “How To Play” – a screen full of small text telling one how to play a game about an Enchanted Chalice. Not a graphic to be found … I don’t want to play that game, if it is that hard to learn.
Not a great help screen for a mobile device.
Of course, one can make all the same mistakes in mobile help as in PC or web application help, or even in printed materials:
What's the readability score with this many icons???
I don’t really have a top choice — so here some I really liked, with a little comment about why.
This one makes me laugh. Really.
Here's one that is actually appropriate for its content.
And the minimalist approach. No words. Just do it!
Effective - enough info to do something in the app, attractive layout, not too busy.
Other Useful Gleanings
Take a look at DashCode – a tool provided with the Mac OS X library. According to Joe Welinske, “is an interactive editor that helps you combine HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create web applications. You can do a lot of things with Dashcode but one of the pre-designed templates has some interesting possibilities for mobile user assistance.”
I think these things very much are dependent on audience and the message you are conveying. To start off on a smart note, I’ll go quote a smart guy.
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” – Albert Einstein
Or how it’s more often put: “As simple as possible, but no simpler”
IKEA has some quite awesome instructions that are completely void of text. If you can read arabic numbers and count you are good. It has happy faces and sad faces, big Xs over things you shouldn’t do, etc. Brilliant in its simplicity, and not fancy at all. Black print on white paper. If your problem is as simple as putting a bookshelf together, this is the way to go.
So the pitfall seems to be complicated explanations to easy problems. I quite frankly can figure most of these things out myself, but just tapping and swiping on the screen. It’s not really needed. In fact most UIs at this level don’t need any explanations.
But the example with the game just might. A game can be quite complex. Some people don’t want to play complicated games, others do. I find that text to be just fine, if the game is complex. I’m used to reading rules for games. Trying to explain a complex game in too simple a way will not work.
But really, that is for the complex cases. Simple mobile apps, and quite frankly almost all of them are, should not need help. If they do they more than likely needs a UX fix instead:)
I really do agree with this comment: “Simple mobile apps, and quite frankly almost all of them are, should not need help. If they do they more than likely needs a UX fix instead:)”
The trick of course is to figure out UX fix what is needed.
In the case of the simpler ‘swipe to play’ apps – yes, the ‘average’ user probably knows how to use the device and doesn’t need explanations. I’m a “try it first, read later” sort of user so I would never even see the help. However, as a newbie, I still remember being somewhat lost while trying out my first few apps on the iPhone.
I did like the last example, with the game graphics and some short/sweet text. If you have something you need to tell your user, I like that approach. Make it look like part of the app, try to provide useful info that can be consumed easily and quickly.
I liked the simplicity and humor in the Google example, but a video? For something that simple? That’s the product of a tech writer with access to marketing collateral gone wild.