In - App Help Menu is hard to understand

[Timothyoung97]

As a first time user, I opened up your help menu. I find it confusing, which would require me to refer to your UG/GD.

The confusion is caused by the lack of labelling your in-app help menu.

For example,

in addtoclass | atc,

the atc can cause some confusion without clear labelling. User may think that this is just a short form and something not related to command.

[nus-pe-bot]

Team's Response

We think for first-time users, always need to read UG before starting to use our product because there are many necessary guidances in UG that need to be read like installation and command formats. The help menu is for the user who forgets certain commands, and by using the help menu, he could quickly get the command he needs. Under this consideration, we assume that the user knows atc means a shortcut for addtoclass because he has read UG. Behaviour of help works as expected as mentioned in the UG.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.Rejected]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: I think the team's responses and assumptions are valid. However, only from a developer's point of view.

From a product / UI design perspective, I don't think that this is a good reason to not label the help menu with the relevant headings.

Heading should be a base minimum for any table to give an overarching idea of the content that is under it. The least the team should do is to insert 1 additional line for the heading.

As a first time user looking at the help menu, it is not very intuitive for one to understand add | a as a command just by looking at it without a heading telling me the overall picture. At this stage, most people would be probably confused, then proceed to view your UG. Then typically reading the UG is like reading an essay -> How will that help me as a busy private tutor to save time?

In addition, what is the percentage of times when a user actually refer to the UG? Given that your target audiences are private tuition teachers, I do not think that many will refer to the UG at the start. Most of the time, people just want to get up to speed and start using an app immediately. It is very unlikely that a non-programming background person would actually know about UG.

Furthermore, even if a user does have a programming background, how will looking at this help menu help the user? Normally, users would most probably forget the parameters required to input rather than the command prompt. However, while looking at your help menu, it does not serve its purpose by reminding the user of the parameters to input. And again, if I, as a busy tutor, still have to open up a website and read through the UG again, is this very troublesome?

Therefore, when I first used the app, the help menu doesn't really help me at all. Even after I learn the commands from the UG, some of the parameters required to input are really hard to memorise.

The team should also consider the situation that users may be using the application without internet connections since this is a desktop application that can run without internet. The team may argue that there is always PDFs saved on the desktop. Then what if the user deletes the PDF as well? Then the only thing to rely on is the help menu.

Conclusion:

• Severity: The team may change this issue to very low, since it is just a lack of additional information and cosmetic flaws. However, this issue should not be rejected simply under the assumption that all users will want to read your UG.

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