[Sigia-l] When Should a Manual be Web-based?

[Beau Lebens]

At the risk of being executed for not having any research to support my 
comments (unless over 6 years of personal web and general computer-usage counts 
as research?) I'd like to offer another consideration that may be important -

Part of the "how much will people use it?" question is also - "will people use 
it?"

<disclaimer>Following situations are not *necessarily* comparable to call-
center situations etc, where a manual is pretty much required to do your job, 
these comments are based more on web application/online tool usage</disclaimer>

In my experience, people very rarely look to a manual unless they feel they 
really have to, by which time they are often getting annoyed already and not 
necessarily thinking straight enough to find a particular piece of information 
in an entire "library" of helpful details (i.e. a complete manual ;)

What I have seen people use more is the context-sensitive help system that are 
around on the web - things like a question mark next to a form field, a short 
comment describing the format required, things like that. So rather than 
produce an actual manual, you scatter your help system so that it is provided 
at the point of need - hopefully where the user actually wants it. This means 
they don't have to "switch tasks" and go off looking for an answer, since it is 
hopefully provided "inline".

If you have access to some technical savvy, you might also consider integrating 
this approach with a manual of some sort, having the context-sensitive help 
snippets being pulled dynamically from a larger collection which can be 
browsed/searched/read as a compelte manual.

Just my 0.02c :)

Beau
-- 
Beau Lebens
Information Architect
beau at dentedreality.com.au
Dented Reality - http://www.dentedreality.com.au/
Information Architecture - Interface Design - Web Development

> On another note, I am very sceptical when we advice and present models of
> issues/behaviour to support our advice without clear/stated research