UXmatters has published 43 articles on the topic User Assistance Design.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence in machines that we’ve programmed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. In recent times, AI has successfully carried automation to the next level with its wide range of capabilities. AI is bringing about the transformation of industries across diverse domains. The information technology (IT) industry is no exception. In fact, the IT industry has enthusiastically embraced the immense potential of AI to transform virtually every aspect of its operations. Professionals within the IT sector have engaged in extensive discussions regarding the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI-driven technologies.
Although market analysts have connected the rapid rise and widespread adoption of AI to recent downsizing at major IT firms, it is crucial that we harness the potential of AI to benefit the IT industry. Highlighting the positive aspects of AI-driven technologies is of the utmost importance. Read More
User assistance occurs within an action context—the user doing something with an application—and should appear in close proximity to the focus of that action—that is, the application it supports. The optimal placement of user assistance, space permitting, is in the user interface itself. We typically call that kind of user assistance instructional text. But when placing user assistance within an application as instructional text, we must modify conventional principles of good information design to accommodate certain forces within an interactive user interface. This column, User Assistance, talks about how the rules for effective instruction change when creating instructional text for display within the context of a user interface.
When designing user assistance—particularly instructional text within the context of an application—we should keep the following typical user behaviors in mind:
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:
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