One of the findability features in our help systems that we often overlook is the breadcrumb. Breadcrumbs typically sit above the page title and highlight the hierarchical path that leads to where you are. Here’s a screenshot of a typical breadcrumb, taken from Adobe Illustrator’s help: Greg Nudelman discusses breadcrumbs in one of his chapters in Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success. This post … more »

[amazon-product align="right" alink="#082ef6" height="250" region="us" tracking_id="idrabewr-20"]0596802277[/amazon-product] Search Patterns: Design for Discovery (2010, O’Reilly), by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender, explores search in depth, from every possible angle. Search Patterns is a must-read for anyone interested in search and findability. It should be particularly applicable to technical communicators, who rely on search as a key method for users to locate information. The book is foundational and, … 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 »

The following 10 minute video shows what’s new in the help system for the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. The key trends are as follows: Help is embedded in a browser because the browser is the predominant mode people use to find information. Search is the main method for navigating content. There’s still a table of contents, but no more index. When … more »

I like Ben’s point here — that if users search the web for help more than they search an application’s help file for help, perhaps we should dress up our help to look more like the web. Lots of comments on this post.

Mike Hughes explains for the advantages of making content easily accessible and searchable online rather than trapped in a PDF. Very engaging voice and style in this post.

I don’t know if it was my long bike ride along a river or my immersion in the writing phase of a documentation project, but this week I’ve been pondering Mike Hughes’ assertion that help should be a “mile wide and thirty seconds deep.” I first heard Mike mention this help landscape metaphor in a podcast several months back. Mike also wrote an article called … more »

Write Answers, Not Documentation

The last podcast I recorded, on “Make Your Help Indispensable, Safeguard Your Job,” with Mike Hughes, was so full of good information about how to make your help more valuable and user-friendly that I couldn’t help but write up notes on it. Here’s a list of the ten things I learned from my last podcast: 1. Make your help a mile wide and thirty seconds … more »