Organization suggestions for non-context sensitive online help

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

Victoria Mezydlo is developing an online help system for <<... a
third-party web-based application. We purchased this web-based application
with the understanding that we would use it "out of the box" as much as
possible, meaning no significant modifications or customizations would be
made to the software. The creation of context-sensitive windows-level help
falls under this no modifications category. However, we will place a
button/link on the main application form that will launch our help system.>>

You mentioned later in your message that you have three departments to
provide access to in your help system; if you can place one button on the
main application form, there's no obvious reason you couldn't create three
buttons instead (one per department); if space or other constraints prevent
this, perhaps that single button could be replaced by a popup menu activated
when the user clicks the button. For that matter, if you have room for three
such menus, you can even list the subdepartments you mentioned as menus for
each departmental button--assuming that this improves access to information
rather than simply providing more potential blind alleys for users. This
approach immediately helps you flatten your help hierarchy.

<<Because we cannot create context-sensitive help, when any user clicks on
our help button/link, the help system they access will contain the
information for all 3 departments.>>

That being the case, the first thing users should see when they reach the
help system is a link to a good, comprehensive index (see the techwr-l
archives for our discussions of indexing HTML documents); an index provides
efficient access to any topic when users don't know which department they
should look in. In addition, provide access to the main kinds of things you
expect users to need access to: functions for each department and
subdepartment, broader categories (e.g., cutting red tape, spying on
personnel records, wasting time with online forms <g>), or whatever. Talk to
the audience to find what categories of links they want to see first, then
organize your approach around those preferences.

<<Does anyone have any suggestions about how I can organize the help system
to reduce the number of clicks any user has to get to the information they
are looking for?>>

Another way to do this is to sit down with a few colleagues and brainstorm
the types of categories into which the overall collection of information can
be organized. (The more closely these reflect categories your audience would
use in their normal working life, the better.) You need to strike a
compromise between having a relatively shallow hierarchy that lets people
reach what they're looking for in a maximum of 3 clicks (where feasible) and
having so many choices at each level of the hierarchy that users would waste
more time finding where to click than if they had to click a maximum of 5
times to dig down through the hierarchy and reach a topic. I'm not aware of
any general rule on how to balance breadth and depth, though I've read about
a fairly techy approach you can use to analyze decision trees and come up
with more efficient hierarchies. However you design your hierarchy, use
white space and headings skillfully to group and separate information at
each level to facilitate scanning by readers.

<<Also, any suggestions for the button/link name?>>

If you're correct in assuming that the three departments are your first step
in organizing information, use "University of Illinois Online Help" as a
heading, then list the three departments under that heading as independant
links.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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