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Design: User Assistance Design

UXmatters has published 42 articles on the topic User Assistance Design.

Top 3 Trending Articles on User Assistance Design

  1. Improving UX Writing

    April 20, 2020

    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

  2. Using Personas During Design and Documentation

    October 18, 2010

    Picture this scenario: You are using an application to work on a time-critical project, and suddenly, you are stuck for want of information about a particular screen. Time is running out. You reach for the application’s documentation and spend a few minutes trying to figure out what to do next. Thankfully, you are quickly able to locate the relevant information and continue with your work. You are pleased with the documentation and praise the unknown writer.

    In this case, the application’s documentation served your needs well. How did the writer of your application’s documentation know how to meet your needs? The most likely answer would point to the effective application and use of personas. Read More

  3. Designing Tables 101

    User Assistance

    Putting Help in context

    A column by Mike Hughes
    September 21, 2009

    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

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