CUED Help Systems (1996)

Our Site

We have 1000+ undergraduates, 300+ postgraduates and many of the staff have accounts on our central system. An increasing number of users work off-site. Users are assumed to have basic computer skills.

The main teaching system uses Unix, but we aim to offer information to all people using computers here. We have over 1000 networked machines on site.

History

I suspect growth of on-line help facilities at many non-central sites is “organic” – a compost of manual pages, local handouts (by COs and users), adapted material and programs’ in-built help. Ours has grown from similar components, but as the number and literacy of our computer users has increased, and Teaching System computers have become spread over 3 labs, our online help system has needed to cover more subjects in greater depth. Now there’s fairly good coverage of most computing and IT issues. Hard information as well as lighter, chattier material exists.

Commercial help systems exist, but are hard to justify for smaller sites. We have tried various free options.

• Originally there was an introductory handout on Unix and online manual pages.
• We extended the range of handouts. We put the DVI files online and wrote a menu-driven “handouts” script so that users could access them. We wrote a menu-driven program that delivered text-only files. We began to encourage the use of e-mail queries.
• We (briefly) used gopher to bring together the text-only and some DVI files in a single hierarchical structure.
• We currently use the WWW. We still have about 60 handouts on our racks but all of them, and much more besides, are available online. We provide a number of e-mail contact addresses.

Current set-up (1996)

We’ve used the WWW to provide help to users for nearly 2 years

• It’s popular with users.
• The software’s free and previous material can easily be incorporated.
• Remote users (including those with text-only access) can easily be accomodated (we use few pictures and sometimes prefer ASCII-art to screendumps).
• Software and hardware suppliers are increasingly providing documention and support in HTML form.
• We can provide access to various information and query mechanisms through the one interface. We use e-mail, newsgroups, DVI files, PS, ftp, keyword search facilities, company-supplied HTML, man-pages, etc.
• From the same source files we can produce paper and online versions (LaTeX, the html package, and latex2html; Word and Internet Assistant).
• We can devolve maintenance of material.
• We can show users information classified in a way (or in ways) they want without having to store the information using the same classification method.
• We can layer the information thus hiding complexity and providing annotated overviews of the available handouts.

The help system’s entry page offers various navigational means –

• Task-based or Subject-based “tree” structures
• Keyword search
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Hot Links to popular subject areas

The material comprises a few dozen big documents with connecting tissue – nearly 5000 files. About 10% of higher level links are external.

Our help command runs Mosaic or lynx according to circumstances. help can be given an argument – one of a small list of subjects. The idea of this facility was so that we could provide 3 word answers (e.g “Do ‘help quota'”) to many common questions.

In practise, it seems to have encouraged people to confuse man
and help.

Issues and Evaluation

It’s the first help system we’ve had that I’m happy with. I’d use it to store the info I collect even if only I accessed it.

• Person-hours – Much of the initial structural work was done by a Researcher/CO plus a keen and able post-graduate. I maintain my part of the material by skimming newsgroups, adding my replies to students’ questions, and writing material pro-actively. Much of the material’s stored as LaTeX source.

  Now, as WWW use is being encouraged throughout the department, much of the CO time spent on WWW development is on behalf of admin staff and the teaching office rather than the help system. We are encouraging (not very successfully) admin and teaching staff to maintain their own material.

• Trying to change user attitudes – The transition to using online facilities is painful for some (for a start, reading flat text from a screen is reckoned to be 20% slower than reading from the page – cut-and-paste is faster though), but there comes a point where one has to use stick-and-carrot tactics to encourage more use of electronic info systems – for the users’ benefit as well as ours. I think the time is right to risk disenfranchising those who only read information off paper. We have regular users of our system who still don’t use e-mail let alone the help system, so personalised user education is still necessary. The online help system gives me more time to deal with this dwindling minority. When I try not to answer their questions directly, preferring to show them how easy the help system is so that they’ll look there first in the future.
  
  
  
  • If people come to my office to ask me a question I try to use the help system to show them the answer.
  • If that fails I e-mail them the answer later, thus encouraging the use of e-mail. Then I add the missing information to the help system so I don’t have to answer the question again. Telling the user that I’ve done this helps them feel part of the team.
  • When people repeatedly asked RTFH (sic) questions I sometimes ask if I can watch them use the help system to see why they couldn’t find the answer themselves. Frequently it transpires that they didn’t try the help system first, sometimes they’ve never tried it (though they say they have).
  • If a user mails me saying “Help!!! how can I forward my mail?”, it’s tempting to reply “Start help, go to the mail section and look at the section about forwarding“, but maybe it’s kinder to say “We’re trying to improve the online help system. Type ‘help’ and mail us if you can’t find the answer as quickly as you’d like.”

  We haven’t restricted user access to support-staff, nor do we intend to, but we’ve made help provision less dependant on staff presence – especially important when the help providers sometimes have deadlines of their own to meet.

• Problems that users have –
  
  
  
  • Not knowing that help exists.
  • Being put off by initial failure (if they fail to find information in one field of study, they won’t bother using the help system to solve other problems).
  • Confusing help and man
  • Confusing help with the help facility in bash, matlab, etc.
  • Not wanting to read more than a sentence or 2 of instructions.
  • Over-using brute-force searches

• Feedback – We invite e-mail feedback from various pages, but receive very little.
• Logging – We log all WWW accesses (out of term-time the main LaTeX page is read 30 times a day, the main C page 12 times a day, the main help page 21 times a day) and keep some record of what people didn’t easily find. We maintain a FAQ. We don’t have a bug report tracking system.
• Availability – We’ve made just about everything available to the outside world. I get more feedback, corrections etc from off-site than from CUED and it’s tempting to write the material in a site-neutral way. PDF versions of major documentation can be produced in “CUED” and “World” versions. Some of our subtrees are informally mirrored.
• Copyright Issues – We have copyright notices on all our major documents, saying that educational establishments may use them free.
• Paper – Paper copies still are available, but we’re making it clear to users that these are likely to be out of date and lack functionality. N.B. – we don’t charge for handouts, nor do we have print quotas!

Update: 1998

• From July 1996 to May 1998 help system usage has doubled. We now intend to use a new machine to provide WWW cache and help system facilities.
• The Task-based page has gone. The Subject-based page has been improved. The keyword search is better. A link to the logs added.
• netscape is now our default browser
• More people maintain the material. A new C++ course has encouraged more people to use the help system.
• A homegrown House Style has been adopted.

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Update: 2000

• Usage is doubling each year – in May 2000 there were 151K successful page requests.
• Extra facilities (e.g. PHP3) for authors have been provided.