A big change from PC application to mobile app is the 'help' feature. Not the addition of the feature, but the removal of it.
"Help" is a distinguishing characteristic of PC and Mac applications. All modern applications have it, and most have the dual-mode 'general' help and 'context' help. The Microsoft guidelines for well-behaved Windows applications specify the "Help" menu and the "About" information. (Possibly because Apple's specifications for well-behaved Macintosh applications specify them.)
The concept of on-line help precedes Windows and Mac software. The venerable Wordstar program offered help (on-line help) in its menu configuration. Unix has provided the 'man' utility for decades.
Yet look at any mobile app and you will see no help feature. It is not a menu option. It is not a button or a hidden screen.
Apps for smart phones and tablets do not have help. And they don't need it.
This is a big change.
I can think of a few reasons that mobile apps have dropped the 'help' feature:
Single-screen focus PC help is designed for multi-window displays. Mobile apps are designed to display on the whole screen. iOS and Android enforce this; Windows RT allows for two apps to display but not an app and its help screen. When the app takes the screen, there is no room for help messages. Switching from the main app to the help app might be too much of an inconvenience.
No example There is no reference app that uses help. All of the apps run without help, and new apps copy the designs of the existing apps.
Simplicity of operation Mobile apps are designed to be simple. So simple that help is not needed. The user can operate the software without the help of help.
Of these reasons, I prefer the last. Toggling between an app and a help screen is awkward but possible. Allocating a portion of the screen to help is also possible; many apps allocate space to advertisements.
I like to think that mobile apps need no help because they are easy to use. This easy comes in two forms: ease of operations and ease of understanding the concepts. Services such as Twitter and Facebook provide easy-to-use apps that manipulate a relatively simple set of data. The concepts they use are easy to grasp.
If this is the reason, then we have an interesting aspect of mobile apps: they must be simple enough that they can be used by the average person with no help. That is, there is an upper bound on the complexity of the app. Photoshop and Visual Studio will never be mobile apps, at least not in their current forms.
As applications migrate from desktop to web to mobile, they must become simpler. (Web apps, like mobile apps, have dropped the 'help' feature.) If my theory is correct, then we should see the mobile versions of apps like Microsoft Word and Excel existing as simpler versions of their desktop PC counterparts.
I keep saying 'simpler', but that should not mean 'less powerful'. We may see some reduction in capabilities, but I suspect the big changes will be to the user interface and the techniques we use to manipulate data.
2 comments:
I like overlay helps which show which button does what, and includes a button "see more" on the overlay, to open a page that shows example.
I hate it when help comes only the first time you open a screen (context), and comes with the "do not show this again" checkbox, especially when there's no way to reset that option.
As for apps like Photoshop/Visual Studio, since they are mostly used by professionals, I don't think the complexity bound applies; they are more willing to brave the learning curve compared to the laypeople.
Of course, making the interface as intuitive as possible is a new challenge to be tackled in mobile software arena, but sacrificing screen real estate for a permanent modal help icon ("touch the icon you want to get help with") should make it easier.
Or maybe we have evolved as endusers....
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