Help: student feedback

[amyjko]

1. In this paragraph, "breakdown" is used (my guess is) in relation to the definition discussed earlier in the chapter. Perhaps this word could be bolded again to remind the user we're discussing a newly learned term again?

"Another potentially useful signal of a need for help is when users undo or erase actions they have just performed. One project showed that these events can indicate confusion about how to use a feature, where 90% of the undo and erase episodes indicated severe breakdowns in user’s ability to progress on a task (Akers et al. 2009)."

2. This part read like it was an add-on at the end of the paragraph with the image break above. I think it could use some text expansion or a graphic since it seems like a cool service. Or, incorporated somehow into the Lemonaid portion.

I helped commercialize this system as a company called AnswerDash, which uses the technology to offer contextual help to websites experiencing high numbers of support requests.

[amyjko]

There are several forms of helper, such as F&Q, live-agent, assistant. Would it be possible to have a diagram or table to lay out their main similarities and differences? Maybe in the future iteration, you can include some paradigms about voice assistant helper, such as Asking Alexa for Help, instead of ones on the screen.

[amyjko]

After reading the chapter Help, it is great to know that people moved from technical documentation to automated help content.

It would be great if you could provide more examples of recommending help and generating answers, especially with the modern interface that we are more familiar with. I still couldn't figure out what was generating answers based on the MixT tutorial capture example that you gave until I opened the link and read the paper "MixT: automatic generation of step-by-step mixed media tutorials".

Also, I would like to know if help system means less learning curve.

[amyjko]

Re: vocabulary problem:

I was surprised to learn what a massive problem this is. I think to highlight this issue even more, it would be good to provide an example of a word or phrase that people describe differently. For example, if a designer uses the word "ribbon" to describe a " graphical control element in the form of a set of toolbars placed on several tabs " what are the alternate words that users are using?

Another point you can also add to the above content is that the crowdsourced information can also be difficult to understand or misleading.

"They are too artificial and change to much to ever eliminate the need for learning, and that means that something or someone will have to do the teaching." Change to "They are too artificial and change TOO much....."

[amyjko]

"An evaluation of the system showed that users loved it when they got answers quickly; they didn’t care where the answer came from. They hated having to wade through every question only to find out the answer wasn't present and they disliked expert's long answers, which experts wrote to appear knowledgeable to superiors."

Following this section, I feel like you could posit a question about the implications of users preferring less information, and not caring about the source it came from. Throughout the book, you have often asked questions that provoke introspection and reflection. In this advent of misinformation and disinformation, this is a very interesting insight that we should seek to understand.

"I suspect that interfaces will always require help systems. They are too artificial and change to much to ever eliminate the need for learning, and that means that something or someone will have to do the teaching. "

I think it would also be helpful to note some examples of what is being done in the industry in more invisible and non-traditional interfaces like AR/VR/VUI, and what is being done there to bridge these gulfs of evaluation and execution. The gaps are often so large and people might "abandon the interface" if not used properly, so I wonder what companies like Alexa or Microsoft are doing to address this.