Help Is For Experts

Jensen Harris: Help Is For Experts

One of the most interesting epiphanies I’ve had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: “help” in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts.

How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.

Definitely an article worth reading. My experience has been that expert users don’t use help because they assume it will be useless – usually because it is. Quite possibly it’s useless because it’s incorrectly targeted at beginners.