Lines Matching full:help
1 page.title=Help
8 <p>This page covers design patterns for making help accessible in your app and tips for creating help content for users who are eager for assistance.</p>
10 <h2 id="your-app">Designing Help into Your App</h2>
12 <h3>Don't show unsolicited help, except in very limited cases</h3>
17 <li><strong>They're usually not necessary.</strong> If you have usability concerns about an aspect of your app, don't just throw help at the problem. Try to solve it in the UI. Apply Android design patterns, styles, and building blocks, and you'll go a long way in reducing the need to educate your users.</li>
19 <p>The only reason for showing pure help content to new users unsolicited is:<br>
22 <p>For example, we use help content to teach users how to place apps on their Home Screen. This functionality is:</p>
39 <p class="clearfix">Bottom line: when it comes to offering help in your app, it's much better to <strong>let users come to you</strong> when they need it.</p>
42 <h3 id="standard-design">Follow the standard design for navigating to help</h3>
44 <p>On every screen in your app, offer help in the <a href="{@docRoot}design/patterns/actionbar.html">action overflow</a>. Always make it the very last item in the menu and label it "Help".</p>
53 Even if your screen has no other action overflow items, "Help" should appear there and not be promoted to the action bar.
56 <p>We've established this standard design so that when users are desperate for help, they won't have to hunt to find it (see design principle: <a href="{@docRoot}design/get-started/principles.html#give-me-tricks">Give me tricks that work everywhere</a>).</p>
59 <h3 id="help-urgent">Assume that every call for help is urgent</h3>
61 <p>In addition to help, you might want to expose other information, such as copyright info, credits, terms of service, and privacy policy.</p>
63 <p>Let users access this information through the Help menu item, but optimize the flow for people with urgent questions about how to do something or why something is happening in your app. The smaller subset of users who are looking for legal fine print or the names of the people who created the app won't be as burdened by taking a few extra steps.</p>
65 <p>The same is true for any communication options you might want to provide, such as contacting customer support or submitting feedback. Offer these options in a way that doesn't add an extra step before users see help. When you put the help content forward, you increase the likelihood that users will find the answers on their own, which in turn reduces your support costs.</p>
67 <p>When someone chooses "Help":</p>
84 <p>Present a dialog asking them to choose between help and other options.</p>
88 <p>Immediately launch a web browser with help content. Place other options in a footer.</p>
92 <p>Build a help screen in your app and offer other options in the action bar. For example, you could let users contact you with questions or feedback through an action button. The action overflow is the ideal place for non-help information that users rarely need.</p>
93 <p>This requires more development work than launching a web browser, but it's a nicer experience for users because they don't leave your app to get the help they need and doesn't require a network connection.</p>
97 <h2>Principles for Writing On-Screen Help Content</h2>
99 <h4>Help is part of the UI</h4>
100 <p>On-screen help is an extension of your app's UI, not a description of it. All words on the screen from the core app to the help should follow our <a href="{@docRoot}design/style/writing.html">Writing Style</a> principles so that the end-to-end experience feels seamless and cohesive.</p>
108 <h4>Help me scan, not read</h4>
109 <p>People don't read help from start to finish. They scan around, looking for a piece of information containing the answer they need. Make it less burdensome with friendly formatting and layout choices like bold headings, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, and white space between paragraphs. And if you have a large amount of content, divide it into multiple screens to cut down on scrolling.</p>
112 <p>What's better than a screen that's easy to scan? A screen that requires no scanning at all because the answer's right there. Consider having each screen in your app navigate to help that's relevant just to that screen. We call this <em>contextual help</em>, and it's the holy grail of user assistance. If you take this approach, be sure to also provide a way to get to the rest of the help
