FrameMak­er 2017 deliv­ers online help for mobile devices and includes two new respon­sive HTML5 help templates.

For years, FrameMak­er has been a lead­ing tool to cre­ate long and com­plex doc­u­ments. But if you required an online help sys­tem from FrameMak­er, you need­ed anoth­er soft­ware prod­uct, whether it was Web­Works (in the late 1990s) or Robo­Help (after 2005). A few years ago, Adobe changed all that, enabling FrameMak­er to cre­ate web- and mobile-friend­ly con­tent direct­ly from the soft­ware product.

FrameMak­er 2017 pro­vides two new respon­sive HTML5 tem­plates. Here’s an exam­ple of a help sys­tem for a fic­ti­tious prod­uct using the new “Indi­go” template:

Here’s the out­put using the “Ocean” tem­plate that comes with FrameMak­er 2017: 

FrameMaker’s Improved Search

In a world where users have embraced search, FrameMak­er 2017 includes some improve­ments by dis­play­ing key­words as you type in the search field. For exam­ple, when I start typ­ing a search query about “error mes­sages,” the respon­sive HTML5 starts pro­vid­ing sug­ges­tions on the fly, sim­i­lar to Google’s search engine. This “pre­dic­tive search” is avail­able in the respon­sive HTML5 help that is shipped with the lat­est ver­sion of FrameMaker.

Accord­ing to usabil­i­ty con­sul­tant Jakob Nielsen, users love search for two reasons:

• Search lets users “con­trol their own des­tiny” and assert inde­pen­dence from com­pa­nies’ attempts to direct vis­i­tors on web sites.
• Search is also users’ “escape hatch when they are stuck in nav­i­ga­tion.” When they can’t find a rea­son­able place to go next, they often turn to the site’s search function.

Giv­en that users love using search, it’s some­what sur­pris­ing that Nielsen found that they are often not very savvy when it comes to for­mu­lat­ing search queries.  He writes: “Typ­i­cal users are very poor at query refor­mu­la­tion: If they don’t get good results on the first try, lat­er search attempts rarely suc­ceed. In fact, they often give up.”

As cus­tomers increas­ing­ly focus on search to find rel­e­vant con­tent, the new search engine that is shipped with FrameMak­er 2017 is a wel­come addi­tion that should improve the user experience.