RTFM!   25 June 2009

I spent a couple of days agonizing over the help screens for 32×32. No, really:

It looks like a lot, but each page has just a couple of lines of text at most. Users are more willing to digest several short snippets of information over fewer pages filled with “walls of text”. But trying to communicate even simple interactions with such little text is tricky. Originally (as you might be able to make out) each page was suppose to have an animated, screencast-esque image to go along with it, but that ended up being too much work for me to handle. Images and animations definitely help though. To keep the work manageable, I used fewer images and instead of animations I used static images which convey motion (a skill in itself).

Once I decided what to say, and how to say it, the next question was: do I really need to say it? Help screens should not discuss each and every feature of an app. It ends up being a very tedious user experience. A good rule of thumb is to teach users the basics, and to give them enough knowledge to discover the advanced features.

The final help screens for 32×32 was trimmed from the 7 pages I have up on the wall. I ended up using 4 help pages (covering 6 topics) with 3 images in all.