490779 - Toolbar's "Help" is context-sensitive, which can be confusing to users

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, defect)

Description

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

From pyrzak's students' research:

"The help link in the toolbar is sensitive to which page I am currently on.  It takes me to a more specific page than would be expected from a generic help feature. If I am on a different page than the one I want help for then I will have to hunt for it.

"The expected behavior of a toolbar option is that it will have the same functionality from anywhere on the site. It seems that this was implemented to give the most relevant help to the page currently being viewed, but it is an unexpected behavior for a toolbar link."

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

Contextual help seems pretty common to me (MS Office, many applications where you can click F1 to display help based on what you are doing, e.g. setting your preferences, ...). I think this is less frustrating than some generic help page.

Comment 2

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Yeah, no, I agree that context-sensitive help is great. The problem that the research pointed out was that the link is in the toolbar, which is confusing. I'd expect context-sensitive help to be in the context--like, say, near the top of the page content, and not in the toolbar.

Comment 3

[Guy Pyrzak]

another way to fix this might be to have the help link take you to the general help but to have a nice unobtrusive link to the content that is sensitive to the page. 

My example would be something like change the url to be
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/3.4/en/html/index.html?context=bug_page.html

I'll attach a mock of what the index page would look like

Comment 4

[Guy Pyrzak]

Attachment: Mock of how help page could look

Comment 5

[Guy Pyrzak]

I hate the wording but the idea is show it at the top of the page as well as highlight the link to the page we were going to send the user to in context as well.

Comment 6

[Kohei]

We don’t have the contextual help on the global header anymore. The Documentation link is there, but it takes you to the doc index.