Workshops

Many usability practitioners have applied their skills to improve the usability of online help systems. This workshop addresses an even more basic challenge: why users don't interact with help systems in the first place. It focuses on the question of usable access to help systems, which has “fallen between the cracks” of our many related disciplines (usability, information architecture, documentation, UI design).

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Overview of Workshop's Premise

Usability practitioners have heard, read, and probably contributed to discussions of why so many help systems aren't helpful. For example, the content doesn't meet users' needs; the organization (information architecture) is confusing; audiences use different terminology from the authors.

But all of these issues assume that that users access help and are frustrated by what they find. This workshop addresses an even more basic challenge: why users don't interact with a help system in the first place.

The idea for this workshop emerged from dialogues with colleagues about the challenges of conducting usability studies of products with help systems. We often observe in product usability tests that people don't use help systems, even when they get stuck and the help is there. These experiences led to the desire to learn more about why people do and don't access help.

The question of usable access to help systems has “fallen between the cracks” of the many communities of practice in our discipline (usability, content management, information architecture, documentation, interaction design, UI design). The facilitators believe this workshop will support the UPA 2004 conference theme: we hope to connect these communities of practice, to explore the problem of connecting users with help systems.

Goals of the Workshop

This one-day workshop will explore users' initial interactions with help systems. Our goals are to supplement the literature with insights and guidelines from the usability community, and to identify potential directions for new research that could address this difficult problem. We intend to achieve the following outcomes:

• Perform expert reviews of help system access mechanisms by workshop participants
• Develop guidelines for use by interaction and interface designers
• Identify desired research to validate, revise, or enhance the guidelines

Our greatest hope for the workshop is to foster a creative breakthrough and, through our group discussions, create a new paradigm or paradigm shift in how people access help.

Topics to be Covered

The workshop will examine existing help system access mechanisms or interfaces, and will use our evaluations of these access mechanisms to develop guidelines for interaction and interface designers. First, the whole group of participants will look at one example provided by each participant, creating lists of strengths, weaknesses, and issues to discuss (such as user goals and tradeoffs).

After reviewing all the examples, the group will agree on issues that deserve further examination. Then we will divide into subgroups, with each subgroup taking some of the issues. The subgroup will use their own experiences as practitioners, as well as the initial group reviews of the examples, to develop guidelines for practitioners who integrate help systems into product environments. The subgroups will also create lists of unanswered questions.

The whole group then reconvenes, and the subgroups report their draft guidelines. After a group discussion, the workshop participants will agree on guidelines and on unanswered questions that need research. As a final activity, the group will create a preliminary outline for the User Experience or UPA Voice article.

PARTICIPANT SELECTION CRITERIA

We hope to attract a diverse group of participants interested in the challenge of helping users to use help. In particular, we welcome:

• Practitioners and designers who have worked with the content, interaction, and interface design and/or development of help systems.
• Usability professionals who have evaluated help systems.
• Researchers who have investigated help systems and users' interactions with them.

Position papers from participants must include two types of information:

• Background information, including participants' general experience with help systems and biographical information about their experience in usability, UCD, information architecture, and/or content.
• At least one example, with discussion, of techniques by which help systems have been integrated with their environments. We are interested in both good and bad examples; the discussion should address the strengths and weaknesses of each example.

Applying to Participate in This Workshop

A workshop is a closed session. Admission to a workshop requires an approved position paper from you addressing the issues suggested by the coordinator(s). Please send your position paper (which should be roughly 1 to 3 pages) to Stephanie Rosenbaum, stephanie@teced.com . Position papers received by March 24 will be accepted or rejected by March 31, in time for you to register before the early registration deadline on April 2. Position papers received by May 5 will be accepted or rejected by May 12, in time for the May 14 registration discount. Papers received after May 12 will be evaluated at the facilitator's discretion. If you want to register early for UPA and have not completed your position paper by these deadlines, you may register for the rest of the conference and add the workshop fee later.

PRE-WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT ACTIVITIES

Participants must submit position papers as described above under “Participant Selection Criteria.” We'll ask accepted participants to read all the position papers and formulate issues before the workshop.

PRE-WORKSHOP FACILITATION ACTIVITIES

The facilitators will review the position papers and select up to 20 participants who provide a variety and balance of useful experience and relevant examples. We'll send each participant all the position papers, and ask that participants read the papers and formulate issues before the workshop. The facilitators will also draft an agenda and a preliminary list of issues and discussion topics; the list will depend on the position papers, but might include such topics as:

• User help-seeking behavior
  • Fact finding: looking for a specific piece of information.
  • Process finding: looking for how to do something.
  • Decision support: looking for information that will help users choose their next course of action.
  • System discovery: browsing for information with no particular goals.
• Help system access methods

• Passive vs. active access
• Context sensitive vs. context independent access
• User sensitive vs. user independent access

• General issues

• User demographics, e.g. gender, age, technological savvy
• Terminology and naming of help access mechanisms
• Trade-offs in use of screen real estate

POST-CONFERENCE ACTIVITIES AND DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS

Because we want the workshop results to reach the wider UPA community and other professionals in our field, we plan several kinds of dissemination of our results:

•  A poster summarizing the workshop results, for display in the conference Commons area

•  An article submitted to User Experience or UPA Voice

This workshop is intended to be the second in a series of 2004 workshops exploring users' initial interactions with help systems. The first workshop is scheduled for April at the ACM SIGCHI conference, and a follow-on workshop is planned for October (SIGDOC 2004 Conference), which will build on our accomplishments at the UPA 2004 workshop. Then, after the series of workshops is complete, the facilitators will communicate the overall results to all the communities of practitioners where workshops took place.

FACILITATORS

Stephanie Rosenbaum

President

Tec-Ed, Inc.

Stephanie Rosenbaum is founder and president of Tec-Ed, Inc. A member of UPA, ACM SIGCHI, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, as well as a Fellow and Exemplar of the Society for Technical Communication, Stephanie is a past vice-chair of ACM SIGDOC and headed the STC's Research Grants Committee for five years. Stephanie was awarded a Millennium Medal in 2000 by the IEEE; she recently contributed a chapter to the Copenhagen Business School Press volume, Software Design and Usability . Stephanie has attended every UPA conference since the inception of UPA, and has given presentations or workshops at almost all of them.

Laurie Kantner

Senior Consultant

Tec-Ed, Inc.

Laurie Kantner is an information architect and senior usability specialist for Tec-Ed, overseeing and conducting a wide range of client projects. Laurie defines, manages, and develops structure and content for information deliverables such as software documentation, online help, websites, and marketing communication. She also designs and administers usability studies of websites, software, and devices with online information-support components. As both a developer of online help and a usability evaluator who has observed users try (or avoid) online help, Laurie has long experience with the question this workshop poses. Laurie is a member of the Usability Professionals' Association and a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication. She co-authored the paper "Structured Heuristic Evaluation of Online Documentation," presented at the 2002 IEEE Professional Communication Conference (IPCC).

Note on Both Facilitators

Help systems lie at the intersection between information design and user-centered design (UCD), and the facilitators have extensive experience in both of these fields. Their firm, Tec-Ed, Inc., has been solving usability and information design problems for 35 years. In addition to usability projects that inform UCD, Tec-Ed has designed, implemented, and evaluated help systems for many organizations, including Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Microsoft Business Solutions, and the IEEE.