How to get online Help without clicking the online Help
Ever since opening our doors in 1988, we have witnessed an amazing phenomenon known as “The Black Hole in the Top Right Corner”. You may not have ever noticed it, but the traditional location of the online Help has always been in the top right corner. Before Windows 95 came out and added the ‘X’ to close the window, this was a complete dead zone! Now at least the top right area of pages is receiving some attention, but even still, it is only associated as the place to go to close a window.
We have seen test after test, where users struggle to figure out how to complete a task, and they never think to view the site’s online help. We would eventually ask them about the help feature in the top right corner, and they always replied with a meek answer, “I don’t know, I just never think about it.” We have seen a slowly growing trend of sites placing helpful descriptions directly in the context of where potential user confusion may reside. Consider the following example taken from Expedia.com.
With many of the long flights to Europe, customers often will arrive in Europe a day later, which obviously is crucial for users to understand when making their travel plans. What the folks at Expedia decided was to add the small “balloon” icon noting a using tip alongside the traditional indicator of “+1 day” (see Figure 1A). When the mouse rolls over this icon, a pop-up description is displayed (see Figure 1B). Expedia recognized that the user may become confused on a specific area of the UI, so contextual help was added to that area. Figure 1A - Expedia.com - “Confused on what the +1 day means?” Figure 1B - Expedia.com - Hover over the icon to view its meaning A Citibank site provides another good example.
The site uses small question mark icons for users to access a pop-up description box containing contextual help (see Figure 2). Figure 2 - A Citibank site using a ‘?’ to represent context sensitive help.
Again, it is a fact that most users do not access help links placed within the main navigation of the site! Placing the quick-help tools directly in problem spots can be a good second line of defense. Naturally, running your site or application through a usability test to understand how to fix the underlying problem is the first line of defense!