The Humane Experience

Expanded Text vs. New Topic-- When should you use expanded text (type 2 link) versus going to a new topic (type 3 link)? (See 10/26 blog for...

User Assistance Behaviors-- In the upcoming February issue of SIGCHI's Interactions, I have an article entitled "A Pattern Languag...

Hyperjacked!!-- There is a thin line between the skillful interconnection of related information in an online help file and the fragmentatio...

Knowledge Harvesting-- My big aha came several years ago when I was documenting a predictive dialer product (software/PBX switch that automa...

Wireframing-- I don't think that wireframing user assistance is probably a common skill among UA writers, since the user interactions ar...

Ontology and User Assistance Architecture-- User assistance architecture has more to do with elements: how they are presented, organized, an...

Progressive Disclosure and Hierarchy of Information I am currently working on a wireframe for an embedded help pane and wrestling with the r...

Community-building User Assistance For a great example of community-based user assistance, sign up for Trillian, a cross-application instant...

User Assistance as Community Builder A user assistance architecture that was designed to act like a knowledge management system would includ...

Content Management vs. Knowledge Management In a meeting yesterday, I noted that I thought user assistance architecture was evolving to a fu...

Defining User Assistance Architecture I have avoided the job title of architect for several decades now, but it has eventually overtaken me...

Modes of User Assistance One can think of user assistance as falling into one of two modes: pulled UA and pushed UA . In pulled UA , the us...

Categories of User Assistance By its very form, the phrase user assistance implies the existence of a tool, i.e., the thing used . The exis...

Metablog Blogging is an odd activity. On the one hand, it seems absurdly self-centered, as if what the blogger has to say is of such importa...