Mark,

Since you write Help (for hire), I thought I would share with you my biggest gripe regarding Help systems - especially of the MS variety. . .

It FORCES far too much mousing and jumps around far too much!

We have a WHOLE screen at our disposal, yet we get a line or two about an exact particular thing and then a series of little buttons to see more about yet another particular subset of the starting! Why not simply use the scrollability of the window to put all of the realted information right there, where you can read it right away????

Another thing is that damned modal window which pops up with various alternatives if a (supposedly) ambiguous request was entered. The fact that it comes up at all really bugs me, but worse still is the fact that it won't 'remember' which you have just viewed, so when it pops up again (I have to make it do so, since the damned first item I selected wasn't the correct one, so I have to pick another), I often end up picking the same one as the last one becuase it won't place me at the last one I *had* selected a few seconds back!

Yet another thing is the the 'main Help Window' usually disappears when a selected item is presented. So, rather than being able to simply slide the pointer over to anywhere in that Window to activate it, I am forced to move the pointer to a very small (by comparison) area at the top of the presentation box to get the 'main' window redisplayed!

Just because we *can* mouse and click is NO REASON TO DESIGN OVER-MOUSING into a system - *ANY* system! The Help system is the primary guilty party in this design methodology!

While I generally like the Help system layout supplied with VS 6, it still has *all* of these basic problems. Compounding them is the fact that See Also and those other things at the top also now flip screens on you, making usage of the Back button even more required than before!

There, now I feel better!

Regards,

Jim N

>>Actually, not even once...we've found most users really do not like or use Help systems...it's only the top management that wants one :)
>
>As a help author myself (for hire, by the way), this is a big problem. So many really terrible help systems have been foisted on poor users that the smartest of them have just given up. They're sick of seeing textboxes with captions like "DTN number", using What's This? Help, and getting "Enter the number of the DTN here." They're sick of help systems that describe the program, instead of answering questions about how to use it. They're sick of online documentation that's written by programmers who are not writers.
>
>So when someone (err, like me) writes a really good help system, odds are that many people will never even see it, because they've been burned so often in the past.
>
>We talk about this a lot on the WINHLP-L mailing list. It's a major problem, and only time and better help writing can solve it.