Nexus Help Document System Operational
Today we fixed a couple bugs, tweaked the UI a little, and implemented the functionality to support help documentation.
Help Documents
We’ve implemented a simple help document system – both for creation/maintenance and presentation of help documents.
The screenshot (of the live site) shows the first help item expanded. Each help document is written either in terms of “how do I …” or “why can’t I …” this goal-directed form of help documentation makes it easy for people to understand how to interact with the site. [Note: most of the content is “tbd” at the time of this article, but will be updated asap.]
Maintenance
The maintenance aspect of the help system leverages two pieces of functionality that were already in place within the site.
First, we used the drag and drop re-ordering of bundle items technique to make it easy for an admin to re-order the help documents. Second, we leveraged the rich-text editor already in place to allow for more consumable help documents. We extended it with the ability to display images (like this blog), to be able to make the help docs even more useful.
Design For The Future
One thing we did in the design was allow for multiple users to create and modify help documents. We implemented this by creating versioned help documents. We currently prevent this from happening by only allowing a site adminstrator to edit the documents. The versioning will allow us to “roll back” to a previous version of any help document if we accidentally lose the contents of a document.
The help documents can also support user ratings and categorization by experience level – but both of those features are disabled right now. They can easily be enabled if we feel they will become valuable in the future.
Change to the Navigation
The Top Users item was removed from the navigation bar, based on some private user feedback expressing concern that some people might not want to have their “scores” displayed. Since this screen doesn’t really provide much value, it has just been disabled.
