[bins-10]

back: bins-0

Each of these learning experiences has their own set of frustrations:

• Trial and error - guessing game, frustrating, and not possible in incohesive UX. Destructive if user misinterprets the effects of their action. bins-11
• External resources - poor look, no quality control, no checks on behavior of community members, generally one step behind current info or feature sets, quickly obsolete in fast moving systems.
• intro.js, joyride.js: intrusive. Often antithetical to user's goal. Delays use of actual application. Fails with impatient learners, "move fast and break it" types. Frustrating to some. bins-30
• Word of mouth - good, organic. Generally other users are already using the features their peers would most likely want to use. This is good because it preselects valuable information. This is bad because it may silo your users to a specific scope of your application's features. Other users can also perpetuate improper understanding or use of your system.
• Support - coaching is effective, but users would rather not need to talk to someone just to understand your program.
• Tooltips - user does not have to context switch to get support, but tooltips are transient and too brief. No mobile.
• Popover tooltip - too small to contain useful information, too big to be an min-intrusive element bins-4. Disappears when clicked or hover focus is lost--making it frustrating or impossible to copy and paste the content. This is solvable with a "copy message" or "expand content" function, but you almost never see that. No mobile. bins-13
• Adjacent help text sidebar - uses both too much ScRe to be unintrusive and not enough to be actually functional. generally whenever I've seen these it's a complete failure.
• Documentation - no one reads the documentation
• Tutorials - a very effective use case driven choice which is generally how users think. Only downside is users often overlook this resource.
• Search - arduous. Often poorly implemented or incomplete. Puts the onus on the user to know enough about what they want to do in the first place to be able to come up with the search terms to find it. If a resource is found, it's usually a long winded guide with outdated screenshots instead of something like a direct deep link to complete the task the user is trying to accomplish.
• FAQ - FAQs are great but generally can only contain up to 20 elements before information overload
• Info icon popups - similar to popover tooltip but gives more control to the user. These are often copy & pastable or "click to dismiss" elements.
• Chat bots - also use case driven. Akin to a flexible command terminal. discoverable. Negative effect on users who want human support.

It is clear that the drawbacks of all of these options are rather significant. The key factors that impact each option are:

• screen real estate footprint (SREF)
• value prop to SREF ratio
• whether or not user education is offloaded to the user and community or owned by the product team
• ability to control quality of help resources
• clipboard friendliness
• degree of control taken away from the user
• not usecase driven or too comprehensive to be digestable
• whether information is relevant or still up-to-date
• delay time between feature release and support
• how intrusive the pattern is; obscures content, interrupts workflow, or mandates a workflow (such as intro.js, joyride.js)

It's also clear to me that we can take away a few lessons.

The ideal UX is:

• discoverable
• minimally intrusive
• does not suddenly obscure content
• does not take control away from the user
• does not interrupt their workflow
• does not require "side quests"
• does not impede standard browser or OS functions
• accessible without leaving the app
• usecase driven
• contextual
• digestable
• on demand, low or instant SLA
• does not rely on 3rd party information

-

note: bins-16
digression: bins-15
back: bins-0