Windows Vista's Guided Help

Where's Guided Help on RTM?

2006-11-02T19:46:00Z

If you've been using or demoing Guided Help on Vista's Beta and RC builds, you will probably have noticed that it's not appearing in help search results on RTM. Here's what's going on:

Executive Summary: It'll be back again in January (in time for the broad release) on the Online Help.

More detail: Guided Help has moved to be available through the Online Help, instead of shipping on the box. That gives us flexibility in servicing Guided Help content later, if the UI changes. The Windows Help authoring team always makes sure that help content is accurate and up-to-date, but Guided Help content is more sensitive than other Help to little UI changes that can happen like service packs or updates. So it's smart to keep it online, where we can continuously update it.

How do you get online help? Easy: the first time you click Start -> Help, it'll ask if you want to get the most up-to-date content from online. Of course you'll say yes. What's that, you said no? Then whenever you do a search in the help pane, there's a little bar at the top inviting you to opt in to the most up-to-date content online. Oh don't want to have to do a search first? Then at the bottom of the help pane is a dropdown to switch between Online and Offline content. Guided Help (and all the other continuously published and updated content) lives online - you probably already were getting online content without realizing it.

I still want to demo Guided Help: If you're working at Microsoft and reading this, and you want to demo Guided Help, we have made Guided Help content available to install locally on your demo machines. This content should not be distributed - everyone will get Guided Help online soon enough, and this content is just to keep let you keep demoing for the next couple of months.

You can go to \\broomcloset\public\ACW\demofiles [Microsoft internal link, won't work outside Microsoft] and this contains simple instructions for installing it. If you don't have access to that, then Guided Help will be back in January. In the meantime, you can show off these videos:

http://blogs.technet.com/james/archive/2006/09/20/457713.aspx

http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/guidedhelp.mov

Designing Guided Help

2006-09-24T21:50:00Z

Designing a new feature is a tricky thing. There are the business decisions, like "Will it help convince somebody to switch to Vista?", or "Will it help save a user money?" There are also technical questions, like, "Can we actually build the thing we have in mind?", and "How much time and writer/dev/test/design/usability resources will it take to ship it on time?" For any feature we make, we need to be confident that its bang to the user is well worth the buck Microsoft spends to develop it.

Those are interesting decisions to make, but in this post, I thought it would be interesting to write about some of the more detailed questions, once we're committed to building it.

We started with a basic goal of the feature: Create help content that can either do the steps for the user, or show the user how to do it himself. That sure sounds like a good idea, but lots of things sound good. How do you know that it's a good idea? One big way to find out if it works is usability testing.

Usability testing is where we get volunteers to come in and try out our software while we watch. (We offer a gratuity, which is usually free software at the Microsoft company store.) We look for different kinds of users, depending on who the product is meant for. For Guided Help, we were testing with beginner computer users; the kind of person who uses Help and would benefit from a tool to help them get some multi-step task done. Usability testing is usually done an early version of the software.

For some of our early Guided Help usability tests, we used animated mock-ups, or even just Powerpoint slides, instead of running code. We do that because we need to figure out the right way to build something before we invest time and effort in making the real code.

With a prototype, we can have two or three different designs to try out, and see what works better.

Some major lessons that usability testing taught us:

We need both Do It and Show Me

We tried often to just pick one and go with it: after all, simpler is better, so if we could eliminate a choice, that would be good. But it turns out that different users prefer different modes, and it always came out about 50-50.

We also thought Do It mode people would be those who were into efficiency, and just wanted to get something done. And we thought that Show Me fan would be beginners who wanted to learn.

In fact, what we discovered is that the people who like Show Me best are those who like to see details. There's a personality type that says, "I'd rather watch each step" that doesn't seem to have much to do with how much experience you have with computers. And Do It mode folks were those who were comfortable with just handing over control to the computer, and didn't even want to know the details. We affectionately nicknamed the two main personality types the "micromanagers" and the "delegators". :)

Do It mode shouldn't be too fast

In our original designs, Do It mode would just zap through each step, and the UI would go by in a blur. Every single user got confused by that. Even though they just clicked a button saying "Do it for me", when it actually happened in front of their eyes, they didn't like it. So we slowed it down, and added an animated green arrow to look like the mouse pointer going around clicking.

Lead the user's eye where to go next

There are points where Guided Help will highlight a control, such as a listbox, and let the user pick something. When the user's done picking, the user has to click Next in the Guided Help window. In usability, we noticed that most people didn't realize that. They'd choose something in the list, and then stop, confused about what to do next. So we added bubbles to draw the users' eye to the Next button.

Wording

The wording of the links to "Do it automatically" or "Show me step by step" is very hard to get right. The problems are 1) Guided Help is a new thing, so nobody knows what to expect if you click the link, meaning we have to let them read about it 2) People don't read. So if we do explain it, it doesn't matter because no user will read 8-10 words if they can help it; we all prefer to scan for keywords we recognize and click on the first one that looks right. So Dave Johnson, the writer for Guided Help (who also had a significant hand in lots of the design decisions), worked on a lot of revisions of the text to make it brief, but understandable. We learned through usability testing that the link with gray sub-text works okay: users are willing to read the link because it's so very brief (just "Do it automatically"). They can see by the way the sub-text is gray that it's optional text. It's only when they realize that "Do it automatically" doesn't quite tell enough that they go ahead and read the sub-text. Believe it or not, this kind of quick micro-decision about where to put our attention really happens. That's how we all read pages. That's why newspapers and web-pages have columns (a narrow block of text is less intimidating), and organizes the page with headlines and sub-titles, so you can scan quickly to decide what to read.

Ignore the giant icon!

Even with the big icon, and the two links at the top of the help topics, many people would completely ignore them. This blew our minds at first. A user opens a help topic, and there, right at the top, with a big juicy graphic, are words "Do it automatically" or "Show me step by step". What do users' eyes do? The zap directly to step 1 of the help topic. Something about the size and the way the graphic plus links are a unit makes them 'ignorable', like a banner ad at the top of a webpage. The solution? Change step 1 so that it reads "Click one of the links above…" You can see that special step 1 in the first screenshot, at the top of the page.

We learned a lot from usability, and we'll learn even more when people starting using it for real. This is a 1.0 feature for us, so we know we'll have made some assumptions that turn out not to be true. We've done all we can do to check those assumptions, but learning from our users never stops.

Andrew McGlinchey

Program Manager, Guided Help

Hello from Guided Help test

2006-09-23T04:26:00Z

Hey folks. My name is Kevin Feige and I'm the Test Lead for Guided Help. Our team tests all aspects of Guided Help to make sure everything works as expected under all sorts of conditions.

One question that will come up as our customers author their own topics is, "How can topics be tested to ensure they work?" To start things off here are some general things to think about when testing your content with Guided Help:

i. Consider the "state" of the machine. For example, is the Start menu in Vista mode or classic mode? What about the Control Panel? What happens if the user changes these settings? What if UI is only available when a specific piece of hardware or software is installed? Rather than having Guided Help stop because it can't find a UI element, have error checking built into the script so that the user receives better feedback.

ii. What failures could occur along the way that would prevent the topic from completing? Could your application's UI be modified by the user that causes the UI to appear differently than your Guided Help topic expects?

iii. What if the UI is slow to appear or if other things are happening on the machine that slow things down? Should the timeout of a specific step in your script be increased to compensate for this? And this also goes for the target hardware your application will be deployed to. What if the machine is just inherently slow?

iv. Then there is localization. Are you deploying only in one specific language or are you planning on multiple languages? The Guided Help Authoring tool that comes with the Vista OPK can only handle authoring for one language at a time, so if you're using it, you'll want to re-record each script for each taget language. The Guided Help team is hoping to make a tool available that we use internally, that lets you record scripts as 'language neutral', meaning they can be recorded once and played back on any language. That's how the scripts that ship with Vista are recorded.

There are many more topics and details with regards to testing Guided Help topics. I'm just barely scratching the surface with the ideas above, but it's a good place to start as you plan on writing your own topics.

My team and I will be contributing more to this blog in the future so stay tuned for more ideas about testing Guided Help.

Thanks,

Kevin

Authoring a Guided Help topic

2006-08-26T03:35:00Z

I'm starting up a series about authoring a Guided Help topic today. You can see the video here or on soapbox (below).

Video: Authoring a Guided Help topic

The authoring tools are available as part of the OPK (a toolkit for OEMs that I know relatively little about), and may also be available through a similar toolkit for corporations (WAIK). However even if you don't have access to these, you can learn more about creating Guided Help content through this video series.

Thanks,

James Technorati Profile

ACW does kung fu

2006-08-02T02:42:00Z

Here's a fun review of ACW.

PS. I'm going to put together a post that covers the authoring experience soon (as it stands today).

James

Guided Help - You following yet?

Guided help is a real gem. When it kicks in using a ’show me’ button it really does know kung fu. Areas of the screen are highlighted and a larger cursor points out what to do accompanied by some nice on screen text. If I was clever I’d capture it as some video and upload it to YouTube or something. But I’ll let someone else do that. This is very good and you only get asked if you definitely want to change something (which also kicks in the related security dialogue as the Guided Help program clearly has the power to change your setting on your PC). All in all, quite impressive. I’m sure Microsoft will publish the API for this as it really is a cool feature and would be very useful in some shockingly complicated applications like SAP and such like.

Guided Help blogcast

2006-07-10T23:13:00Z

There's a cool screen capture video of Guided Help in action. I haven't seen these blogcasts a lot before, but they're pretty cool - maybe we'll have to do some. I'm tickled by the phrase "virtual whiz-kid" - that's definitely how I'd like users to feel. :)

James

http://blogcastrepository.com/blogcasts/37/windows_workstation/entry1540.aspx

Long Zheng had these comments to go with his blogcast:

There are two major improvements in this area. Help is no longer for the inexperienced. And help is no longer long pages of text. Not only if help going to offer support to the computer novice, it also offers advanced tips and tricks that caters to all users. Guided help introduces interactivity and assistance to the knowledge-base, kind of like having a virtual wiz-kid, visual cues will assist users in completing many help tasks. Interestingly, if you notice the arrow in the ‘compass’ always points to where you need to look at. Also the window moves around pretty fluidly placing itself around the focused area.

Creating a Guided-Help ready application

2006-06-29T21:11:00Z

Perhaps in response to our hints at plans to release Guided Help for use by ISVs, we were recently asked about what is necessary to prepare an existing Windows XP application to use Guided Help for its own features.

Well, probably nothing at all. :) Most of the time, it will just work.

The caveats: to allow Guided Help to work with your application you will need accessibility support. Guided Help relies on good accessibility (MSAA) implementations - while this mostly happens automatically with the Windows Controls (so most simple applications have reasonable accessibility for free), it is necessary to add support for custom controls that you create and may be necessary with 3rd party controls. We have a lot of code to handle mild errors in MSAA implementations, but we can only do so much :).

Why do we use MSAA? Well, we don't always do that - for PSS, it made more sense to use the extensibility framework and write reusable actions in code. But in general, it's super important to us that Guided Help topics/tasks be very inexpensive to author and one great way to do that is building on the UI that is built for the application. Also, in many cases there simply isn't a supported code-based pathway to completing a task. MSAA is a great (almost) always-available way of allowing authoring of many scripts to be simple recording by an expert in the application. We'll talk more about how Guided Help topics are authored and maintained in a future post.

The Accessibility SDK tools can be downloaded here. Inspect32 is the tool we use most often for verifying accessibility implementations. It's worth noting that this also gets you good support from the Speech Recognition that's included in Windows Vista.

Verbatim feedback from the support version of Guided Help

2006-06-21T07:16:00Z

We were looking at the surveys coming back from the support version of Guided Help and were really delighted to see that we're making people's computers easier to use. I love the impact of working at Microsoft. I've included a few choice quotes below, as well as the answer to an anonymous question.

The compliments (thank you)

The information on this page helped tremendously and the download got my Disk Cleanup working again. I take back everything bad I may have ever said about Microsoft.

Guided Help was very convenient for solving my problem. I had this problem once before and tried to solve it manually, but it took hours. With Guided Help it took less than a minute.

Technical support

How does one download guided help if their problem with TCP/IP is keeping them from getting online? The rest of the article is sample gibberish and unhelpful.

Response: It can be done. You can download Guided Help on a different computer. It will create a package for moving Guided Help to the computer with the problem. See step 5 on this page to see the steps involved.

I'm thrilled by these comments - I see a problem solved and a customer delighted, and a massive task turned into a minute. We're hearing great success rates overall and look forward to hearing from more of you.

Thanks again for the support,
James Finnigan

Guided Help SDK

2006-06-20T10:47:00Z

Lots of folks have been wondering about a Guided Help SDK. One thing that's very important about Guided Help topics is that they're inexpensive to create - we have a fairly rough SDK that makes this easy (even easier once the products involved ship). But we have concerns about getting the security story right and we think that ISVs/MVPs/IT folks will want some features in addition to what we had time to put together in the Vista timeframe. We're working on addressing these concerns, but in the very short term ACW (Guided Help) will be for apps that ship with Windows, Microsoft support and OEMs.

But what if the SDK was available? What would you do with it? We'd be very interested in hearing about how you think Guided Help could be applied to your business, project, or interests. What other features would you want than you've already seen? Feel free to comment or email us directly at acwfeed @microsoft.com.

Thanks,

James Finnigan (Guided Help developer)

P.S. - Look for Andrew to have more to say about this topic soon...

Guided Help is in CNET's top 5 things I love about Windows Vista

2006-06-20T10:37:00Z

They love it. :) To respond to the question of whether or not we'll be adding more topics: We will be adding more topics mostly though our online help (secured of course) and continuous publishing (via Windows Update, IIRC). But also check out what we've done for Windows XP on http://support.microsoft.com/

5. Enhanced help
Help used to be limited to a few pithy sentences about the task you want to perform. Windows Vista changes all that. There are more options available within Help inside Vista. For example, you can initiate a remote-assistance session so that someone you trust can take over your PC remotely and diagnose a problem or perform a task for you. You can also go online and search Microsoft's knowledge base or contact Microsoft's technical support. One really cool feature, however, is labeled Do It Automatically. Here, a task such as checking the version of a driver will be automated, with your desktop going dark as a pointer arrow floats over the screen indicating what to click and where. From time to time, the pointer will stop and a dialog box will require your input before it continues to perform the task. While there are only 15 of these automated help sessions within the current Windows Vista beta 2 release, we hope Microsoft adds more.

Thanks,
James Finnigan

Guided Help is RTW!

2006-06-17T02:04:00Z

Guided Help is not only a Windows Vista product, it's also being used by Microsoft's support website to help people complete the steps in a kb article. We no longer tell folks to whip out regedit and check a registry key or search their harddrive for a particular file.

Check it out! To get an idea of what downloading and using Guided Help on XP is like, check out this link which has a screenshot walkthrough. But better yet, check out the list of Guided Help topics in the pilot. You can clearly distinguish when a guided help topic is available.

A word of warning - it will really do it! That's sort of the point. So don't run one about formatting your harddrive if you don't want it done :). This one is really safe, though, if you just want to try it out.

Enjoy! (the team is accepting feedback at acwfeed @microsoft.com)

James

Guided Help - feedback

2006-06-17T00:29:00Z

Hi there, I'm kicking things off here for the team. My name is James Finnigan and I'm a developer on Guided Help. We have a few people on the team and you'll probably get to know them more as they post in this space.

Now that beta 2 is out there and people can see and use Guided Help, we'd really like to talk to you. We'd like to hear about times when things didn't work well for you, as well as when they did. We've spent a lot of time trying to make Guided Help as easy to use as possible and while we've studied how people use it a fair amount, we've never had anywhere near this many people using it. It's exciting(!)

We'll also share some news, history and also plans about how we would like to improve Guided Help and bring the Guided Help experience to more people.

So please add your comments here. We look forward to talking with you.

Thanks,
James