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Helping the Experts

When creating Help for any application, the typical starting point is user profiling. We create user personas, find out what tasks users perform, and identify which tasks are more frequent. We also note users’ preferences for delivery format and language.

However, as applications become more and more sophisticated, their Help systems tend to be equally complex. Some of the reasons for complexity in a Help system are that, more often than not, users have a variety of roles, with different sets of permissions for changing configurable options, and different levels of expertise. The result is an intricate and multilayered Help system. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of managing this complexity is providing Help that is really helpful to expert users.

Who Are the Expert Users?

Expert users are individual users who use an application extremely skillfully, perform most tasks super-efficiently, and achieve the highest performance results. They use the application very frequently—either as a professional or as a hobbyist. They understand the application’s complex functionality very well and look forward to mastering it.

Expert users like to take shorter routes to completing tasks and often discover these shortcuts themselves. They are continually on the prowl to find and internalize knowledge that leads to performance improvements. They are highly motivated, active self-taught learners, preferring exploring to assisted learning. They participate enthusiastically in user forums, answering rather than asking questions.

How Can You Help Expert Users?

Writing Help for expert users is always a challenge. They quickly cover the basic learning curve for an application and soon find all the typical Help content overly simple. What can we then feed their hungry minds?

* To satisfy their curiosity about the application, explain why in addition to what and how. Consider how Google ranks search results. For expert Google users, knowing why a specific result ranks first has a very high importance. Such users have a natural urge to understand why a result so closely matches their search objective. Explain it to them. You can make viewing such in-depth information optional by providing links to it from procedural Help pages.