A highly regarded resource for designing and creating online help systems. Also covers other related subjects, such as error messages and menus.
See the chapter on user assistance for a good discussion on writing task-oriented Help, Help window design, and the Help topics browser. Also presents useful information on context-sensitive Help, tooltips, status bar text, and Help buttons in dialog boxes.
Provides useful guidelines for all aspects of documentation.
Appendix A, "Windows 95 Help Style Guidelines," presents an excellent discussion on modern, task-oriented Help; the motivation for the Windows 95 Help system design; guidelines for writing Help; Help window design; and many other Help-related topics. It gives useful information on how to integrate context-sensitive Help into your program. It also gives useful strategies for testing and debugging Help.
Chapter 5, "Usability Heuristics," presents an interesting study of online help that found that 23 percent of the time help requests found no useful information at all. In the cases where users did find help information, the users considered it useful only 35 percent of the time. Although it might seem obvious that Help should be helpful, it cannot be taken for granted.