Design: User Assistance Design

UX writing involves designing copy for user-interface (UI) elements that users employ in interacting with applications. This copy includes labels for menu items, commands, buttons, and form controls; error-message text, alert text, and other instructional text.

To ensure a good user experience, it is essential to design user-interface text to be accessible to users with different abilities, regardless of how users navigate the software—whether using speech, keyboard, or mouse device—or if users have color-deficient vision. UX writing must serve all types of users and help them interact with a user interface successfully. In this article, we’ll provide some guidelines for effective UX writing. Read More

Tables get a bad rap—especially in the Web world where, once upon a time, Web developers misused them for HTML layout. But tables are still very useful for the purpose for which they were originally intended—a way to show relationships among discrete data points. From a user assistance perspective, we deal with tables in two contexts:

1. user assistance—Tables can present information or instructions in our documentation.
2. user interfaces—Tables can display information within a user interface itself.

In this column, I’ll review some of the basic principles of good table design from an information developer’s perspective, then discuss their visual design and interactivity. These principles and my examples provide the bare essentials of table design. When designing tables, a key information design objective is keeping them simple, so if you start needing more than this column provides, you might be making things unnecessarily complicated for your users. Read More

Picture this: You’ve just signed up a new customer, and they’re excited to get going. Everything seems great on paper—until their questions start rolling in.

“How does this feature work?”

“Why can’t I customize my dashboard?”

“Why won’t this integration connect properly?”

Despite the best efforts of your support agents and Customer Success team, confusion about your product might be too much for your customers. Without proper guidance, they could become frustrated and eventually decide to leave. This scenario is all too common. Over 90% of customers believe that companies could do a better job of onboarding, and a UserPilot survey shows that only 24.5% of users adopt a core feature, while the rest abandon it because they don’t immediately understand how to derive value from it. Read More