The VoIP Girl makes a point about online help:

Online Help belongs with the application. When I click Help > Online Help, please DON’T send me to the Knowledge Base or FAQs. Please DON’T open up another browser window and make me wait while the generic Help home page appears. Please DON’T make me use the Search feature. High level user guides or getting started tutorials are great, but make sure they’ve got some meat in them.

A Knowledge Base gives you little gulps of info with no breadcrumb trail to follow and no sense of context. To really aid and educate users, build Help right into the interface. Take the time to explain fields and buttons before I use them. To provide more information, use a fly-out Help pane (part of the interface that’s only visible when needed) and pull the content from an online server.

I think the reason why online help is often in a web browser, hosted on a server outside the realm of the application itself, for the following reasons. Using the Web as a delivery mechanism for help allow the developer to update the help content without having to deliver an application update or otherwise force a download. This saves the user from missing potentially important updates and also curbs bandwidth use, important in a broadband voice scenario. (“Wow, Bob, sorry you’re breaking up, but I’m downloading a 10 MB help update…”)

The best online help that I’ve seen and used that IS stored locally is Apple’s help browser that comes with Mac OS X. It just about always tells me what I need. Of course, I have to understand enough of the context of what I’m looking for to actually go there. Otherwise, it’s off to Google for some “rubber meets the road” knowledge. For example, whenever I buy a new Mac, I always have to enable the root account, a task I’ve done a half-dozen times since 2001, but can’t remember how every time. This isn’t in Apple help, and invariably I have to Google it.

The worst online help–well that would be Microsoft. In fact, their online knowledge base is kind of crummy too. I never use their search function. Instead, I use Google to drill down into their online documents because Google allows me to use arguments and expressions that can get me to what I’m looking for more quickly. Without Google, I’d be sifting through page after page of irrelevant documents , click Next Page over and over, until I find what I need.

If Microsoft’s knowledge base / help features weren’t online, I wouldn’t have the luxury of being able to use Google to search them.

But I do agree with the VoIP Girl’s assertion that help needs to be delivered within the context of the task at hand–that’s why I like the way Apple has done it. Apple’s help documents don’t just tell you which windows to open–they actually open them for you using hyperlinks in the document.