The User Assistance for Office XP
By Matthew Ellison
Contents
Click a link below to jump to a particular section; click any "CONTENTS" image following a section heading to jump back here.
Background 
Over past years, the Microsoft Office suite of applications has provided an important model for online Help development. This makes sense—because the product is so widely used, the user assistance supplied with Microsoft Office is probably one of the most frequently-used Help systems in existence. So many of our users are familiar with its presentational and navigational conventions. With this in mind, authors have striven to give their own Help systems a similar look-and-feel.
Back in 1994, I remember many of authors I trained asking me how they could add a button bar to their secondary windows. It wasn't a feature that WinHelp 3.1 (the standard Windows Help format at that time) supported, but Microsoft had managed to include button bars in the Help for Word 6 by using a proprietary technique that was not available to the rest of us. Suddenly, these buttons had become the Holy Grail for all Help authors!
It's less true in 2001 that we look to Microsoft Office to provide the definitive online Help model. HTML-based Help provides vast scope for presenting information in different ways, and even Microsoft now uses a variety of Help designs for its different products. Add into the mix the plethora of new and emerging Help formats (such as WebHelp, InterHelp, JavaHelp, and embedded Help), and it's hard to define a single standard for how Help should look and behave. However, Microsoft Office is still a world-leading product, and it's hard to dispute the fact that Office has had an important influence on our work.
When Office XP came out recently, it had been two years since the previous release of Office 2000, one of the first major applications to embrace the new HTML Help format. I was interested to see how Microsoft's design model for HTML Help had changed during this period. This article describes my observations on the Help for Word 2002 and FrontPage 2002, two representative applications from the over-all Office product.
The First Things You Notice When Using Office XP
 The most obvious change to the user interface of the Office XP applications is the addition of a Task Pane at the right-hand side of the desktop. Although not part of the User Assistance, it does provide additional support for common tasks. When you first open up Word 2002, for example, it provides shortcuts for the most common ways of starting to work with a document. A drop-down list enables you to select other task panes as you require them. For example, there is one for creating and modifying your paragraph and character styles that provides a more intuitive and easier-to-use interface for these conceptually difficult tasks.
Another change to the application user interface is the addition of text input field at the top right-hand corner of the screen. This enables you to type questions into Help's Answer Wizard, and it means that the Help interface is permanently available as you work.
Despite the rumors we all heard early in 2001, Clippy is still alive and well as your friendly/irritating (delete according to taste) gatekeeper to the Help system. Until you turn him off (as experienced users often feel compelled to do), he'll intercept F1 requests for Help and politely request that you express your query in the form of a question. For those of us that would prefer to go straight to a well-crafted Table of Contents (TOC) or Index, this can be a frustration. It's useful to know that it's not strictly necessary to supply a fully-formed English sentence, and entering a couple of well-chosen keywords will usually produce as good results.
 Another survivor from previous versions of Office is WinHelp, still hanging in there as the technology behind What's This? Help, which is available for all dialogs in Office XP. Although HTML Help is capable of providing this facility, the content of its popups is limited to unformatted text. WinHelp lives on within one of Microsoft's flagship products five years after saying it would be replaced by HTML Help.
One of the new enhancements in Office 2000 was the automatic tiling of the application and Help windows. This meant that when you activated the Help, the application window reduced in width and the new Help window fitted neatly into the space beside it. This had the advantage that you could view both windows at the same time without one being obscured by the other.
 There may have been negative feedback from some users on this feature, because the automatic tiling has become an option in Office XP. The Help toolbar now contains an extra button for tiling or "de-tiling" the Help window. This button is beside the button for showing and hiding the navigation pane, and I do wonder how many users will fully appreciate the distinction between the functions of these two controls. Some users, in my experience, have problems enough with the Back button!
Information Access
The Answer Wizard is still the primary access point for the user assistance. As described above, calling the Help results in a prompt from the Office Assistant for a question. If the Assistant is switched off, then you are instead taken directly to the tri-pane window.
As in Office 2000, the Index tab is not a true Index in the sense that Help authors normally understand the term. Rather than consisting of an alphabetical list of words and phrases that the author has individually selected with the users' needs in mind, it's actually a navigation device that's based around the same technology as the Answer Wizard tab. The only difference is that you are directed to type individual keywords rather than entire natural language questions. If you typed these keywords into the Answer Wizard, you would probably get back exactly the same list of topics that the Index returns—so it's questionable that the Index tab is providing much additional value.
There is a minor improvement over the Index tab in Office 2000: you no longer have to type underscores between words when you enter phrases such as "Active Server Page". However, you do now have to separate keywords that do not form a phrase with semicolons—something that may not be totally intuitive to all users.
The Table of Contents seems, as in Office 2000, to be organized largely according to the features of the Office applications, rather than by the needs of the users. Books within the TOC typically contain very large numbers of sub-books or topics, and this results in a somewhat bewildering list of available options as you drill down through the TOC. In each Office application, there is a seemingly redundant top-level book that encloses the entire Table of Contents for that application. Within the FrontPage 2002 book, there are 20 sub-books, which effectively form the top level of the TOC. In my view, this large number of options makes it difficult for the user to decide easily which area of the Help to explore for a specific piece of information.
Windowing
 In the Help for Office XP, Microsoft has simplified its approach to information design, and moved further away from the windowing conventions that were well established within WinHelp 4 Help systems. No secondary windows or popups are available within the user assistance, and all information is displayed within the main tri-pane Help window. This is a change from Office 2000, which displayed conceptual information within a large secondary window. As a result, the user experience within the Help for Office XP is more consistent and predictable—I think this simplified approach works well. However, I suspect the change was driven as much by the technical difficulties surrounding secondary windows in HTML Help as by gains in usability!
Popups have proven useful in the past for displaying short pieces of additional information, such as definitions or examples. However, as described above, HTML Help popups are limited to displaying plain text. In fact, the only Microsoft Help file that I remember using with an HTML Help popup was the Help for Microsoft Help Workshop—and even that had only one popup, the sole purpose of which was to show that a popup was possible! In the Help for Office XP, definitions are provided by text that expands on demand within the current paragraph, as in the following example:
Before clicking on "pixel":
After clicking on "pixel":
This technique is achieved using a piece of relatively simple Dynamic HTML (DHTML), and from the user's point of view is probably just as effective as a popup. From an authoring perspective, this way of providing definitions for terms can cause maintenance problems, because the definition text is included within every page on which the term appears. Contrast this with the case of a popup, when the definition exists within a single topic that can be linked from an unlimited number of other topics.
Topic Presentation
I like the presentation of topics within the Help for Office XP. What I think works particularly well is the "layering" of information, which is used throughout the Help system. The advantage of layering is that it enables users to see the "broad picture," while still being able to drill down selectively into an increasing level of detail within the same topic. As a result, users are able to move from overview to specifics without losing context, and without the risk of getting lost.
The procedure topics provide good examples of this technique. The left-side figure below is a topic that provides the top-level procedure for customizing list forms and views. The right-side figure shows that the second step involves two alternative sub-procedures, which the user has the option to expand. Some users will not need to do this, because they may already know how to modify a form or view. The users who need this additional information can expand the text, and then easily continue to work through the overall process.
 
 There are occasions within the Help where optional layers are nested. For example, in the following topic two top-level, expanding hotspots correspond to the two main phases of collecting data from forms. If you choose to display further information on setting rules, you are then presented with the three different types of rules, and you have the option to expand each of these.
As with the expanding definitions described above, these layering effects are implemented using relatively simple DHTML techniques, which are available through most of the commonly used authoring tools. The additional layers of detail would probably have been delivered using popups in the days of WinHelp, but in this case the DHTML solution is definitely superior because the expanding text persists on screen as you scroll down through the topic.
Finally, it's worth noting that every Office XP Help topic contains an option in the top right-hand corner for showing all the hidden information. This could be very useful for those users who wish to print out the entire topic, or who wish to scan through all the text without the additional labor of clicking on all the expanding hotspots.
Help Content
 One of the main things that struck me about this Help file was the very effective use of graphics to illustrate important concepts and to provide additional aesthetic appeal—especially the "About" topics typically appearing first in the list of topics within each book. A good example is the "About Tables" topic containing a list of the key ways in which you can work with tables. Each hotspot when expanded reveals a small amount of text, and a well-designed graphic that illustrates and supports the point being made.
Microsoft supplements the information within each of the Office XP CHM files with material on its web site, as shown in the figure below. This can be accessed from the Help file in a variety of ways:
- By choosing an entry in the Table of Contents
- By selecting the "Office on the Web" option on the Help menu
- By clicking the "Search on the Web" on the Answer Wizard tab
Whichever of the three access methods you use, the web-based information is displayed within the HTML Help tri-pane window, as if it were a regular topic within the CHM file.
 The TOC entries that point to information on the Web are prefaced with "WEB:", and they use the same icon as all the regular topics within the Table of Contents.
There is a web-based troubleshooter topic within the TOC for FrontPage 2002; however, when I tried it, this web-based resource was unavailable. Instead, I saw the screen on the right displayed within my Help window.
Navigation
I browsed through the Help files to find some links between topics, but was unable to find any—no jumps, no related topics, no ALinks—nothing! I suppose this shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise, as Microsoft had clearly prepared the ground for this with the inactive "Additional Resources" links at the end of every topic in Office 2000. However, when you think back to all the rich cross-linking that was provided in the Help files for earlier versions of Office, it does seem to be a retrograde step.
Inter-topic links actually could have provided significant added value, in my view. It's common to arrive at a topic (from the Answer Wizard, for example) to find that it contains relevant content, but doesn't quite answer the specific question that you had in mind. In this case, a set of links to other related topics could have provided an extremely useful shortcut to the topic containing the desired information.
Summary
My main gripe with the Help for both Office XP and the previous version of Office is the lack of a proper Index. I am uncomfortable using the "pseudo" Index provided, and rarely find that it gives me a well-focused list of results.
I'm uncomfortable with the total absence of links between topics. Although I accept that the nature of Help is that of short, self-contained answers to questions, I still believe that users benefit from being able to move freely among related topics without always having to return to the Table of Contents or the Answer Wizard. If the Help file contained a well-crafted and easy-to-use TOC and Index, then perhaps this lack of navigational freedom would be less of an issue.
What I really like about the Help system is the layering of information achieved with the DHTML expanding hotspots. I think these represent a big step forward in terms of usability from the previous version of the Help, and it's a technique that I expect to see many other Help authors emulate.
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