erin malone:: portfolio
WebTV Help System
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Approach: Back in 1999, three methods of Help were available to the users of the WebTV service - Tours of specific features, Step by Step instructions and Customer Support FAQs. These areas were not connected in any way and were difficult at best to navigate to from within the service. Working with the Customer Support staff, I acted as lead Information Architect and UI designer in an effort to bring the different Help areas together into one section that made sense.
Given the amount of information available, and the levels of information exposed at each level, my goal was to bring the methods together in a contextual way that made sense to the user, depending on their task.
Help was available from every screen within the service - so the section had to work equally well contextually - from a specific section - as well as from top level areas - where a person might come into the main Help Navigation area just to see what was there. The audience using WebTV was older than a general Web audience and this group tended to read instructions about something before actually trying it, so the top level down approach had to make sense and be easy to use.
The main Help topics were organized into categories and we worked to fit them into a few screens as possible. Given the aspect ratio restrictions of the television set, and the fact that the main Help section could not scroll, we ended up with three screens of Help Categories to navigate through. This was less than ideal, but we made sure that the most used features of the site and the most requested areas of help from Customer Support were represented on the first screen of Help.
The final solution presents a category item broken down into three layers - a tour of the feature, Q&A from the Customer support group and Step-byStep instructions for complicated features. Each layer builds on the last with the Tour being an overview of the feature/section, the Customor Q&A, using technology from Ask Jeeves, presenting commonly asked questions about the feature and finally the step by step instructions explaining complex functionality such as Mail or Favorites.
Outcome:The Help section's outward face to the end user, brought together three disparate systems that were originally developed and implemented by different groups within the company. The end result of the project organized all Help together, made sure the links worked as well contextually as from a Help main page and improved the usability of the existing information.