Help Center

I have a weird obsession with in-app help: Why is it that things built to assist us are so damn annoying? Whenever I sign up to a new app, it feels like i get bombarded with 3 months worth of product announcements, a 12-part product tour and an NPS survey. That's super irritating, but it would've been great. In the 90s, you had to leaf through a physical binder, flip to page 154 and find section 6.3.4 to understand a feature. Now, a neat tour highlights the exact button to press. Yet we hate it! I did some research into the evolution of app help and wanted to share in case you're interested: Physical books/PDFs: Just the content. You had to find your own way in the documentation. The help was there, but you had to find the relevant help. Obviously, there was zero targeting or personalization. Winhelp: Windows actually has a proprietary file format called winhelp. It was a separate executable file that launched a window that contained help content in a structured way. A bit more native than a straight up file, but still pretty barebones. All of this is largely pre-internet (or at least pre the internet having mass adoption). Once the internet normalized, we entered the era of the help center.