Smarter support with contextual help

The easier it is for your teams to use our platform, the less time you need to spend fielding questions and providing training. This frees up your time to work on high value tasks and improves the productivity and enjoyability for people using the system. A win-win, which is always a good thing.

To facilitate this win-win we carry out continuous incremental updates to improve the usability of BrandStencil. We use Jakob Nielson's 'heuristic principles' for usability to help us make decisions.

What are 'heuristics'?

Heuristics are broad guidelines for ensuring that software systems are designed to be effective, efficient and user-friendly.

The 10 principles

1. Visibility of System Status
2. Match Between the System and the Real World
3. User Control and Freedom
4. Consistency and Standards
5. Error Prevention
6. Recognition Rather than Recall
7. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
8. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
9. Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
10. Help and Documentation

This article discusses how we have improved the Help and Documentation in the BrandStencil platform, which is heuristic no. 10.

Jakob Nielson recommends:

Proactive and reactive help

Nielson distinguishes between proactive help which is intended to preempt problems by giving the user information before they start and reactive help where users seek advice to address a problem. He suggests implementing a combination of proactive and reactive help 'levers'.

Push vs Pull

Proactive help comes in two forms; push and pull notifications.

Onboardings and product tours which are 'pushed' to the user regardless of their intent or task are known as 'push' revelations. Research by Nielson shows these are often skipped as they can get in the way of the users workflow and they are not recommended.

Information shown in context to a user's current task are known as a 'pull' revelations and are usually triggered by the user's behaviour or location. Nielson recommends using contextual help wherever possible.

Contextual help in BrandStencil

Types of contextual help we use include;

• Instructional, 'on page' text
• Task based hints
• Embedded, searchable help articles
• Knowledge base
• Contact support form

Instructional text

Inline contextual 'on page' help is available at the point where someone needs it to complete a task. It's better to have this information always visible rather than relying on tours or pop-ups. Some people are infrequent users of the system so it's important to give them the information they need where they need it to get things done.

Task based hints (new)

Hints and tips is our latest addition to contextual help. Tips appear at different locations within the application to help people complete specific tasks. These appear after an amount of time on the page so that power users won't see them. The hints are unobtrusive and can be dismissed easily.

Embedded help articles (new)

Another recent addition is embedded help docs which can easily be accessed from anywhere within the platform UI (user interface). The persistent help 'widget' helps people to find information at the moment they need it. Help articles are relevant to the specific page in the application and there is also an intuitive search function.

The help icon can be minimised so it doesn't interfere with the task at hand.

Knowledge base

The knowledge base has articles and guides customised for each user types. Articles are grouped around topics with related links to help people learn. There is also a fully functional search.

Articles include step by step instructions where needed as well as broader advice articles and guides.

We add articles and revise content to keep this up to date and relevant. We track use of our knowledge base to help improve articles and add new information.

Contact support

Although the preference is for people to be able to help themselves there will always be times that they need to contact support.

We make it easy to contact support from anywhere in the platform. This sends a support request which can either be picked up by our team or go direct to an email address at your organisation.