[android-developers] Re: Designing Help into Your App

Personally I always go for option 2, a full screen webview in an extra activity for displaying help for the current page. I store localized HTML files in the assets directory. It's just a matter of adding some language code to the file names and loading the correct page for the current locale while falling back to English. It works so far for me.

I also agree with what TreKing: it's not a top priority for most developers. But in my humble opinion they probably shouldn't write the end user documentation of their own apps in the first place. First of all because of some kind of blindness when it comes to possible real help questions. They know their babies inside out. Second of all documentation written by programmers tends to sound way too technical. I guess it's better to let somebody who isn't that technical but good at writing do that job. And that person should try to figure out the app with a fresh pair of eyes.

Ultimately I don't think that users really care that much about detailed context-sensitive help texts because of "tl;dr". Most users require the app to be self-explaining. At best there should be some easy to understand tutorial overlays that explain UI elements with arrows and short texts.

In an early version of my latest game I tried to "force" the player through a 4 minutes tutorial that explains with an animated character every aspect of the game. I was thinking that ought to be alright and digestible for a one-time experience. But my beta testers felt bored and complained about that. So I went with that overlay mini-tutorial approach. No more complaints.

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 6:09:14 PM UTC-5, Nathan wrote:

I've been thinking about ways to integrate help into an app.

I wanted to see what other people have done.

http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/help.html

Context sensitive, at a minimum, per screen, and possibly point to certain buttons using a PopupWindow to point out something like "This button will . . . ".

What have you done and how well has it worked? I could imagine there are some frameworks or open source project already.

I've thought about using the following technologies.

• A bunch of formatted strings with basic tags in string tags.
  
• A webview in a non full screen activity, displaying one or many simply html files from the res folder (this can't be in assets - in needs to be localized).  
• A popupwindow, using showasDropDown, to anchor it to another view or button that I want the help to be related to. 

Nathan

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