savannanoh
commented
2 years ago - Mention self-adapting interfaces +1
- Why aren’t help search bars in more/all interfaces?
- Vocabulary problem and accompanying diagram difficult to understand
- Is guiding a user through in context still considered a distraction, or is it helpful?
- Are there ethical issues with guiding users through a system? For instance, would companies want to encourage certain behavior and use the tutorial to help with this?
- Include the idea of “walled gardening”
- Talk about help for physical interfaces, voice interfaces, and 3D interfaces +2
- Student had trouble understanding why it is considered a failure to self-diagnose/get help: “Users might self-diagnose the problem, or they might ask for help in an interface or from someone else. This is either resolved or ultimately results the user abandoning the interface. All of these are failures to bridge gulfs of evaluation.”
- Talk about how to handle help cases when the software itself has bugs and the user is doing everything right. What are people expected to do? How can we provide the ebay help in these cases?
- Talk about help forums that exist on popular platforms like Slack and Discord (Figma does this)
- How does help look in the context of accessibility? What research is being done for providing help in accessible interfaces?
- Include examples of ML/AI being used in detecting when people need help and how to help them +1
- Student adds: “For this chapter I would simply recommend including the work of Ailie Fraser from Adobe. She has been doing research that incorporates online tutorials within applications for seamless crowdsourced help. The videos are also timestamped for easy navigation and can be accessed through voice command to promote multi-tasking. Our cohort watched an archived DUB talk from Ailie that can be accessed here: https://dub.washington.edu/seminars/2021-02-10.html ”
- Student asks: “When considering a breakdown, what differentiates a situation where a user can self-diagnose the problem vs. a situation where a user can't understand the problem?”
- Is there research on recognizing when a user needs help via passive input?
- History of what help in interfaces used to look like and how it’s evolved
- Introduce the two categories of help: user asking vs machine providing at the beginning of the chapter
- Show examples of help features in popular interfaces, such as social media, to help contextualize the need for help interfaces. Also show examples aimed at different age groups
- Go over the gulfs of execution and evaluation for each of the following: tutorial, searching for help, generating answers, and recommending help and compare the approaches
- Are there examples of technologies where users can explicitly say their goal and the system guides them to that goal?
- There’s no mention of support chatbots anywhere! +1
- The section on tutorials is very short and vague compared to the other sections. Active user paradox could be explained in more detail. Why are tutorials seen as a distraction? Does this show similarity to how users feel about paper instructions?
- Separate out the section on tooltips from searching for help
- Talk about the benefits of exploration for learnability. Discuss how some friction in the process of understanding how to use a tool can help users discover features they wouldn’t otherwise know about +1
- Add Replay as an example. Replay is a tool that provides video and audio resources within an application
- At what point in the software dev lifecycle does designing help interfaces go?
- What are the pitfalls that occur when a help interface is trying to help users?
- How are the tools that Amy helped develop going now?
- What happens when a help interface gives an answer that isn’t what the user was looking for?
- What happens if someone needs help but doesn’t know exactly what their question is? Are there tools that help a user know what questions to even ask?
- How to avoid designing help interfaces that come across as patronizing? How do designers determine what’s helpful vs what's annoying?
- Include examples of help communities that formed outside of the company, such as Adobe’s user communities
- Does the “20 unique phrases” example still apply today, when use of computers is much more ubiquitous? Why are there so many terms for the same thing in the first place? Should designers be trying to stick to one phrase for consistency, or use a variety of names/phrases to meet users where they’re at? +2
- Have critiques or solutions come out of the vocabulary problem? Student found it backwards that a user already struggling has to shoulder the burden of articulating their problem
- Grammar & typos:
- "This is either resolved or ultimately results in the user"
- "Another approach is in targeting proactive help"
- Student says: “the sentence 'This example explains why a word was auto-corrected to a user surprised when “teh” was corrected to “the” ' can be confusing due to the lack of punctuation. I had to read it 3 times to understand what was being spoken about. A simple comma (...explains why a word was auto-corrected, to a user surprised...) or breaking it into two sentences might make readability better.”