---
title: "How Google Does Help"
date: 2009-06-27
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2009/06/27/how-google-does-help/
---
# How Google Does Help
Last week Google released [Google Voice](https://google.com/voice), a service that allows you to integrate all your phones into one number and includes a host of features, including voice mail, recording, conference calling, and other services.

To help users get started, Google Voice has a list of [20 short videos](https://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html). Only the [overview video](https://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html) contains animation. It's certainly the video they've put the most work into, and it also functions as marketing collateral.

The other videos are fairly simple, with short looping background music, professional voice talent, and a read script. The defining quality is that each video is short, some as short as 25 seconds. 

The videos aren't integrated with the text help. So if you don't feel like watching videos, you can't easily read the same topic. Google Voice does have help text, but it's [on another page](https://www.google.com/support/voice/), only linked to from the videos with a tiny, hardly noticeable help link in the footer. It's almost like one group produced text, another produced help, and they published them independently.

The video windows are small, under 500x500 pixels. The small video window allow you to easily move from one video to the next without losing your place in the site. If you click outside of the window, the window doesn't automatically minimize, which is nice. You have to close the pop-up window to go back to the list of videos.

All the videos are pulled in from Youtube, so they're shareable. After one video ends, you see a list of related videos, but the related videos aren't other Google Voice videos. Instead they are other Google services. So the related videos somewhat fail if you're trying to learn more about Google Voice.

You can't comment on the videos, or upload your own, or do anything other than watch them. Unlike the Michael Pick videos on [WordPress.tv](http://wordpress.tv), Google's videos are somewhat boring. Except for the overview video, which contains an animated stick figure, they lack a sense of being cool. They feel a bit corporate.

Similar to the length of the videos, the help content is also short and to the point, but the help topics are too text-heavy, with almost no illustrations, diagrams, or screenshots. The pages are embedded on the web, and navigating the topics is somewhat tedious. A search field appears at the top of the help, but if you search for the word "videos," nothing appears.

Glaringly absent is any printable manual. You can print a single page, but not a group of pages in a PDF manual format. Additionally, Google does not provide any kind of quick reference guide to get started.

You can't comment below the help topics, but there is a forum. The forum allows you to be notified by email and see the most popular discussions. You can also read a [Google Voice blog](https://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/), but the blog, like the help and the videos, isn't well integrated with the rest of the help materials. It somewhat lives on its own. Google's blog also takes the backward position of disallowing comments and only allows linkbacks to the posts.