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Kevin McGowan wrote:
>Is anyone familiar with the term "inline help"?
>...
>Basically, my developers are using the term to describe the
>explanatory text that appears with each feature of the software.
>I'm used to calling this "online help", though that's not exactly
>what it is either.
"Online help" still means what you think it means. What you're
describing as "inline help" sounds like little helpful blurbs that
are integrated with the product UI, as opposed to in a separate help
system (the more traditional "online help").
The more common term for this is "embedded help" or "embedded
assistance", and can take the form of such things as tooltips, status
bar text, more verbose dialogs, etc. The idea is that you don't need
to have a terse UI that forces the user to turn to the online help
for a simple question. Instead, you can provide more info in the UI
itself.
For example, you can have a "Value:" text box in the UI, but the user
might wonder what range of values are acceptable. Embedded help in
this case could be some text next to it that says "Must be between 0
and 100." Or, you could put step numbers next to UI widgets,
providing the user with a suggested order for them to follow. Pretty
simple, but powerful.
You should congratulate and admire your developers for advocating
embedded help in the UI design. Many are not so cued in to their
users' needs.
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