Help screens should be a last ditch effort when designing a product for users. There are a few reasons behind this thought. First of all the design should be obvious as we have discussed in class before. If your product isn't intuitive enough to be able to figure out the basic functions by yourself and quickly, then there is an issue. However, a counter example to this observation are products such as the adobe suites. Users could eventually figure out the program with a lot of time and frustration, but in their case help screens make the users lives easier. Another explanation for why help screens should be a last resort is for cost effective reasons. If your product needs help screens than you would need to put more money, more time, more workers to work on those. Also, if you need help screens then it might indicated that your product is not designed well therefore (depending on the product) may require customer service (or more of it) thus costing more money.
I believe that the personas should focus on two main audiences. The first audience should be the mild-core to hard-core comic book readers (fan-base). The second audience would be the parents of children who would be potential buyers of the product. With these two personas in mind we can create a product that fans will love and a product that parents would pay for their children to have.
I agree that the help functions should be generally the last resort with a few exceptions like Adobe suites and Photoshop. It's hard to figure everything out by yourself when you're using such software full of features that requires some knowledge and complicate procedures.
ReplyDelete