When you click Twitter’s help link, the help content is divided into three categories: Twitter Basics Something’s Not Working Report a Violation This division suggests a mental pattern about how people use help. You have the newbie group. These people are new to Twitter and need a grounding in the basics, such as what an @ reply is versus a dm. The content in this … more »

In my last post, I argued that navigation systems can’t be entirely discarded in favor of search, because navigation helps users discover the unknown unknown. But now that we’ve covered navigation systems a bit, it’s time to move on to search, because search is undoubtedly a major way that users navigate help content. How can you organize your content so that the topics are findable … more »

In the last post, I argued that topic-based navigation systems generally fail for users. Topic-based navigation has some merits, such as allowing users to see topics in context, to discover other topics through browsing, and to provide one perspective on the organization of the material, but topic-based navigation shouldn’t be the only means of navigating the content. Another way to allow users to find your … more »

Welcome to the new project you’ll be documenting: Project Swordfish. Project Swordfish is an application used by the FBI to train agents in virtual simulations of undercover operations. With Swordfish, users can be super agents and regular agents. The super agents can configure the permissions of the regular agents with 20 different permission settings. This means the relevant help topics for any agent can vary … more »