About and Help in web apps

[scharffc]

Hi,

How do you deal with About and Help in web apps? Where do you put them? Is there a particular format? (We come from Java ME where we had to have a very specific About and it was required).

We have an app where we have a title and a list of options (buttons) and we go from one page to the other using a Home button (that represents the Back). Should we add another button to be About and another one to be Help.

Thanks

Christelle

[isalento]

Hi Christelle,

To my knowledge, no such a requirement exists for Web Apps, or at least I haven't seen About and Help in web apps so far.
Of course it doesn't mean that having one would be a bad thing, in contrast that would probably be better UX.

Maybe you could place a button, with question mark icon, where home button usually is, in the main screen? Then show combined help / about page when it is clicked?

Br,
Ilkka

[sperelson]

Hi Christelle,

We added about and help divs that display when the user clicks the corresponding menu button to all of our published web apps. Nothing very fancy, although our help was eventually a multi-paged affair with a previous/next button setup.

The included information in the about page could be what your Java ME apps displayed.

Regards,
Stephen

[scharffc]

Hi Stephen
What do you mean by menu button? Is it in Options or in a button on the screen?
Thanks
Christelle

[scharffc]

Sounds a cool solution.
Thanks
Christelle

[sperelson]

Hi Stephen
What do you mean by menu button? Is it in Options or in a button on the screen?
Thanks
Christelle

In my app's case, the first screen has a neat stack of divs, each one a clickable menu item that would swap over to a different div. However, more often than not you would not use an initial welcome view with menus. In these cases you would have to figure out a good way for the user to access a menu or go directly to a help screen. This could be with a button (clickable div/img) in a page's title bar for example.

Unfortunately, the Nokia Browser's menus are not configurable by the web app. It would certainly be interesting if they were.