This week in ux-clinic: Does help matter?

June 19th, 2006

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum:

I’m an information designer and developer, aka technical writer. I’ve recently been told that the v1 of our new product will not have context-sensitive help. The engineering team lead says “too bad; no one reads the documentation anyhow.”

I believe it’s impossible to design a totally intuitive UI, since everyone’s intuitive is different, and frankly, we’re not perfect as designers anyway. I think this means documentation has an important role - but since it’s my job, maybe I’m biased :)

So I’m curious about how other organizations either include documentation / support as a first order part of the experience, or how they justify depricating it given how often even the best designs fail their users. Is documentation something easily cut on your projects? How do you justify (or argue against) this?

- Help with help

Posted in UX-Clinic |