Adobe Robo­Help (2015 release) allows users to change the con­tent that appears in a HTML5 help project.

For years, users did­n’t have a lot of con­trol over the type of con­tent that would appear in a user guide or online help project. The tech­ni­cal writer made those deci­sions. For exam­ple, if there were three pri­ma­ry audi­ences for a project, the writer would write the con­tent for three audi­ences, tag them with con­di­tion­al text, and then gen­er­ate three sep­a­rate user guides or help projects.

Robo­Help (2015 release), Adobe’s lat­est ver­sion of its help author­ing tool, gives users more con­trol over the type of con­tent they read. For exam­ple, let’s say I have two audi­ences for this online help project: sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors and end users. These read­ers can con­trol the type of con­tent that dis­plays in the help by click­ing the Fil­ter but­ton and select­ing the check box­es for the dif­fer­ent audi­ences. By select­ing System_Administrator, the help auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­plays the con­tent for that audi­ence. Select­ing User will dynam­i­cal­ly change the con­tent for that audience.

For some online help projects, this may pro­vide a lot of ben­e­fits to the writer and the audi­ence. For writ­ers, they won’t need to pro­duce 10 sep­a­rate deliv­er­ables. Instead, they could cre­ate one deliv­er­able and let the audi­ences fil­ter what they want to view. For cer­tain audi­ences, users may appre­ci­ate view­ing and fil­ter­ing all of the con­tent. Writ­ers could include fil­ters on coun­try (for exam­ple, US or Cana­da), audi­ence type (basic users and advanced users), audi­ence title (sup­port staff or project man­agers), and so on.

Although some advanced users may appre­ci­ate this fea­ture, I am not sure it is for every­one. Here are two reser­va­tions I have:

• Will users even know this fea­ture is avail­able? Users will need to click the Fil­ters tab to see the fea­ture.  Tech­ni­cal writ­ers will prob­a­bly need to high­light and explain the fea­ture as it’s not com­mon on web sites.
• Will users under­stand what to tog­gle? Tech­ni­cal writ­ers will cre­ate the fil­ters. Will users always under­stand the fil­ters that writ­ers cre­ate? There may be times when users pick the wrong fil­ters, lead­ing to mis­lead­ing and con­fus­ing infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion, when a user selects a fil­ter, there may be no vis­i­ble change in the con­tent for a cer­tain topic—resulting in poten­tial con­fu­sion over what the fea­ture is controlling.

When you’re writ­ing for a tech­ni­cal­ly savvy audi­ence or pow­er users, Robo­Help’s dynam­ic fil­ter­ing may pro­vide a great solu­tion. But novice users may not dis­cov­er the fea­ture or read­i­ly under­stand it.

How RoboHelp’s Search Could be Better

Apart from major user inter­face improve­ments, Robo­Help (2015 release) includes an incre­men­tal improve­ment to the way the search engine works. For more back­ground on this change, see this Tech­whirl review.

As I wrote in an ear­li­er blog entry, RoboHelp’s search could be bet­ter by dis­play­ing key­words in the Search engine field.

When you type spe­cif­ic key­words in Google’s search field, the web site dis­plays a list of sug­gest­ed terms as you type the query. This solu­tion helps users because they may type terms incor­rect­ly or may not even be sure how to phrase their queries in a search field. Google dis­plays sug­gest­ed terms and dis­plays rel­e­vant web sites before I even fin­ish typing.

In Robo­Help (2015 release) , users are still unfor­tu­nate­ly left on their own when it comes to craft­ing a good search.

Anoth­er wel­come addi­tion would be faceted search. Com­pa­nies, such as Dell, have used this tech­nique for some time. On Dell’s web site you can search for a lap­top or desk­top com­put­er. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can use the fil­ters to help you search by prod­uct cat­e­go­ry, proces­sor, screen size, weight, and so on.

For users, this helps stream­line their choic­es. In an online help sys­tem, users could use faceted search to dis­play con­tent by top­ic type (con­cepts, pro­ce­dures, trou­bleshoot­ing con­tent, files with attach­ments or embed­ded movies, and so on).

“Faceted nav­i­ga­tion is arguable the most sig­nif­i­cant search inno­va­tion in the past decade,” write Peter Morville and Jef­fery Cal­len­der in their book Search Pat­terns. “Faceted nav­i­ga­tion is being rapid­ly deployed across an impres­sive­ly wide vari­ety of con­texts and platforms.”

I don’t see why it can­not be deployed in a help author­ing tool.