What does online help need?

[Steve Owens <uso01%eagle -at- UNIDATA -dot- COM>]

Paul L. Beck says:

> Not to start a flame war, and with all due respect to Bill Horton and
> his efforts at educating us all, but Bill Horton and the rest of us
> should get our heads out of the balloon help or online help concept
> and lose the page-based document concept.  The field has moved well
> beyond that and it is catchup time unless you've moved with it.

        ...which gives me a nice opening to start another topic thread.
What is needed in an online help system?

        This is a serious question; I've been asked to research the
topic to help our company decide what to do, and what we can do, for
online help.

        Actually, I think that question is a little vague. "Online
help" is a bad term; people use that phrase for different things.  My
brief thoughts lead me to the conclusion that there are three
different things people use online help for:

        1 Reference (particularly quick reference)
        2 Tutorials (i.e. hypertext, VMS Help tree-based structures, etc)
        3 Computer-Based Training (interactive simulations and tutorials)

        So the online help tools - all three of the above - consist of
delivery system and content.  What kind of capabilities should the
delivery system have?  What orientation should the content have?

        One conclusion I'm coming to is that, in most markets today,
multimedia and spiffy GUI online help packages aren't that helpful.
GUI packages with any complexity tend to be maddeningly slow, and don't
really buy you that much, aside from making the buttons you push more
easily identified and more easily pushed (click on the button graphic
with the mouse rather that tab the cursor to that button and hit enter).
The capability for images and diagrams is seldom exploited (and seldom
really *needs* to be).

Steven J. Owens
uso01 -at- unidata -dot- com