A suite of features designed to make technical help in enterprise applications simpler and more usable.

2016 - 18

Scope: web-based enterprise apps, website tools, hardware onboarding

Help has usually been treated as such an after-thought in design that it fails to attract any user attention at all. For extremely complicated technical products that depend upon documentation to explain and educate, the need is for help that is simple, easily accessible and integral to products.

Research on various help features showed me that there were two main issues with help design: lack of contextuality and forced assistance.

When I started with this project, there was no product level help, and customers had to either search for help or remember which website to go to for help.

My focus was on ensuring help became available as and when users needed it. The way I wanted to go with it was to incorporate help within products.

I ran multiple research sessions with customers across the globe.
In total, I surveyed and interviewed more than 200 stakeholders.

One of the points I learned as I began designing the Help Model was that help should not interrupt. Nor should it:
obstruct,
slow down,
distract or
discourage users.

My first thought was to create a pop-up window with help material added within, but that would have obstructed users. I could have created a way to link out help from the product, but that would have slowed the users down. Popping help widgets based on my assessment of when users needs help could have distracted. Providing long form help in unreadable manuals would have discouraged them.

With these principles in mind, I set out to create a help model that was a self-contained panel, flexible enough to be moved around, closed or minimized, but informational enough to lead users through the necessary steps.

I worked with writers, customer support, technical experts and sales teams to determine what would be the best content to put into these panels. I also worked with Product Managers and UX team to determine at what point could these panels be opened intelligently and contextually.

I guided engineering teams and writers so that content was presented in readable chunks. This has become the basis for another project I am involved in, referred to as, "Language Modernization",

Stakeholders and users have been positive about their experience with the model. I am working on glossary and chatbot integration to make technical help intelligent and contextual.

Two of my innovations on enterprise help are patent pending.