Design: 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

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

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