The Importance Of Interface Text (part 2) - Offering Instruction (
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Instructional text is of two kinds - text that is visible on screen at all
times (usually at the head of each section) and bubble help or
context-sensitive help, which appears on specific manual or automatic
triggers.
The thing to remember with instructional text is that it is *not* help - it
only aims to assist the user in understanding the immediate effect of
filling in a particular form. For more specific details, the user should be
guided towards the more detailed help module.
On-screen instructional text is usually an explanatory sentence at the
beginning of the page, with an emphasis on the impending action and its
consequences. For example, in Web forms asking users for their addresses,
the instructional text is usually something like "Please enter your address
to enable us to send you our latest catalog".
Sometimes, a form may be divided into multiple sections. In this case each
section can have an instructional text message.
The best examples of context-sensitive messages or bubble-help messages are
the tags that appear when you move your mouse over buttons, links and other
clickable elements of the user interface. The aim of such tags is to tell
the user "what will happen when you click this". To this end, they need to
be pithy and direct.
If the tag is on a link, or a button that takes the user to another screen,
the message could simply be a statement of what the user will find on
clicking it. For example, the tag for the link "Claims Statement" could be:
"Snapshot of previous claims".
However, if the bubble help is for a so-called "action button", it needs to
state the action that will occur when the user clicks it. The most common
example would be the tag for the "Submit" button: "Click Submit to save
changes".
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