Projects/Usability/HIG/HelpSystem

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Purpose

The help system should be used as a secondary mechanism to support users’ complete and better understanding of tasks — the primary mechanism should be the user interface itself. Users consult the help system only if they can't accomplish a task with the UI.

Examples

Guidelines

Try to make Help unnecessary in the first place:

Make common tasks easy to discover and perform.
Provide clear main instructions as well as concise control labels that are goal- and task-oriented.
Provide supplemental instructions and explanations where needed.
Avoid problems by using controls constrained to valid choices, providing suitable default values, handling all input formats, and preventing errors.
Write error messages that provide a clear solution or action for the user to take.
Usually, the help system is activated by F1 respectively Ctrl+F1 for context sensitive information and via menu.

Implementation

http://www.kde.org/support/