MONK Interface cell help system conference call
Present: Andrew MacDonald, Stefan Sinclair, Carl Stahmer, Stan Ruecker, and Amit Kumar

The first question is where help should go. It might go into the toolset manager calls, on the server. But this would just return strings, rather than images. So should it be part of the tool itself?

Maybe we should separate various help files by format, with links to video.

Should the interface have a way for people to upload things, especially if they are creating custom toolsets? Probably users won't be doing much of this, so we could just take control of it.

We should distinguish tools from toolsets. Users can create toolsets but not tools.

Each tool will have its own help that is attached to the tool. This also makes alternative workbench designs easier to skin.

For toolsets, text could be stored along with the toolsets describing each step. These could also link through to the help for each tool.

Should there be various kinds of information: what it is, how it works, what the findings mean. Then we could guide people through creating help with a generic tool object.

One way to think of the help typology: buttons, rollovers

Another way:

• General toolset overview
• Information about findings and results
• A high-level technological description

I (Stan) think also:

• Links to relevant articles that used tool results from this kind of tool
• Links to articles about the tools

How does all of this connect to the workbench-level help button?

Do we have an XML format for the help file? Not yet. We may alternatively want to have the JavaScript definition contain the tool help. One disadvantage there is that it might be more difficult for a person other than the programmer to change it or add to it. The advantage is that it saves some steps. So Martin or Catherine or others can write the material using the wiki, and it can be transported into the tool.

Instruction-level help. We'd like a line or two at the top of each tool. We have an example of the kind of instructions in Collections Quick Search.

Could we create a list for the key places where help is needed? Maybe Catherine would be able to do this quickly. Screenshots with flags would be super.