Other Help metaphors - long?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Jim Shaeffer reports a premise: <<When designing online user assistance,
there is no requirement that it be book-like. The use of the book metaphor
in WinHelp, with its table of contents and index, is an accident of history.
Other metaphors would be just as valid/invalid and useful/obstructive.
Hypothetical examples follow.>>

The first part is a reasonable premise, since online information is an
immature art and we don't yet know what the alternatives are and how well
they will work. The second part is patently false; the book metaphor was
chosen intentionally because modern books represent the end result of
between 500 and several thousand years (depending on where you want to date
the invention of books and booklike objects) of design evolution. Although
the design of books may have some remaining imperfections, books remain a
highly efficient metaphor for online help, at least in the current state of
the art, because they are familiar to everyone who opens a help file. And
isn't that the purpose of a metaphor--to communicate an abstract concept
(online information) in a familiar context?

That being said, the book metaphor breaks down if you push it too far--as is
the case for _any_ metaphor. The biggest problem with the book metaphor is
that it requires users to stop what they're doing (trying to accomplish a
task) and switch their attention to an entirely different task (reading a
book; that is, figuring out a help system). Even if the user is already
proficient in using the help system, they're still taken away from their
task; my job is to write and edit, not to read help systems so I'll know how
to write and edit. (Our own Deb and Eric Ray described this and other
problems quite eloquently and thoroughly in: Ray, D.S.; Ray, E.J. 2001.
Embedded help: background and applications for technical communicators.
Technical Communication 48(1):105-115.) Hypothetically, the ideal help
system is one that integrates so smoothly into performance of the task that
you never notice you're using a help system. Wizards and embedded help are a
giant step in the right direction, but are still several steps short of that
goal. That being the case, onwards to your proposed metaphors:

<<A Spread Sheet (or Database) Metaphor>>

That would work well when users want to sort and process information, or
perform calculations based on information. "Database mining" software works
on this principle. Another example might be an engineer performing
mechanical design in sofware such as ProEngineer, invoking the help system
to call up an integrated calculator that lets him change the materials used
in a part and determine the resulting load strength. But in terms of
supporting user tasks, this metaphor isn't effective because it imposes an
array structure (usually 2D, but possibly multidimensional) on something
that is inherently linear: performing a task. The metaphor also describes
the underlying technology, not how users would use that technology to find
information.

<<A VCR Metaphor>>

This works best for entirely linear material, such as in instructional
design applications where students can't understand lesson 2 until they've
learned lesson 1. (Mathematics is usually a good example of this.) It also
works well for things like some chemical syntheses and many procedural
tasks, in which actions can only be done in a single order if you hope to
succeed. The problem with this metaphor is that it only ties directly to the
task being performed if that task is highly sequential, and is inefficient
for random access; if I want to find out the permitted values for a specific
field in a dialog box, a VCR is the wrong way to go about it. If you provide
random access via a search engine or index, then all you've done is applied
the VCR name to existing WinHelp technology, which already has VCR buttons
that run its browse sequence.

<<A Filing Cabinet (or Library) Metaphor>>

This is nothing more than a database metaphor, and doesn't really add
anything to the existing help metaphor; though it doesn't support
calculations well, it's superior to the spreadsheet metaphor because
databases are inherently superior at searching and classifying, and if it's
a fully relational database, the "key" for each topic provides a hook into
context-sensitive help. In fact, that's how ForeHelp builds help systems: as
a database, with a "book" front end. Another powerful advantage of the
database approach is that you can build help systems dynamically, both when
you first create the help file (e.g., if you only want topics to appear in
the help if someone buys the module those topics describe) and as an ongoing
customization tool (e.g., if the user selects "minimal help" to get only the
most crucial details, but subsequently wants to switch to "maximal help" to
get all the details for a procedure never before attempted). The problem
with this approach is that it describes the underlying technology, not the
interface users invoke to access that technology and use it to find
information. But it can work really well for online information such as
encyclopedias, since you can present the database tables as pick lists of
various sorts and let users define their query by constraining it: they can
pick only from the available options in various fields, rather than blindly
entering search words in the hope they've guessed right.

One problem with specifying a metaphor such as a database, word processor,
or spreadsheet is that this abstraction is too high-level in many cases. For
example, all three types of software require a search function, benefit from
a spell checker, and so on. So in fact, when I sit down in front of my
computer, I want a single typing engine that works identically for all my
software; now, the keyboard controls in (say) PowerPoint and Word are
slightly and annoying different. I also want an identical editing engine; it
makes no sense that editing Excel cells is so painfully awkward. Why
double-click to edit Excel text when I can edit text in Word with a single
click to position the cursor? Because each program uses a different metaphor
for data displayed on the screen. Jef Raskin talks about this at length in
his book "The Humane Interface". Read this and you'll be annoyed by some of
the things he proposes, until you suddenly find that many of them (not all!)
are making an awful lot of sense.

Perhaps the ideal metaphor for a formal help system that isn't tied directly
into the interface is the one every one of us uses: the tutor or mentor.
Let's be honest: most of us do occasionally turn to the manual or online
help, but all else being equal, we'll ask the expert down the hall to show
us how to do something or we'll send a query to techwr-l. Microsoft's
much-maligned paperclip character, Clippie, is probably 10 years away from
being truly useful technology--a sufficiently great distance that I've
turned off this feature in Office--but it's pointing in the right direction.

I like the topic you've introduced, and don't mean to discourage you in
pursuing it. Please expand upon or rebut what I've said!

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"I vowed [that] if I complained about things more than three times, I had to
do something about it."--Jon Shear


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