While the rest of America was glued to Dallas, my favorite TV series of the 1980s was The Greatest American Hero. In the show, aliens visit awkward school teacher Ralph Hinkley and give him a superhero suit with special powers to save the world. The hitch: he drops the instruction manual. A clumsy crime-fighting career ensues as Ralph tries to work out how to make his superpowers go, tumbling through the sky when he flies and accidentally triggering some new power in each episode. It was deliciously frustrating to watch; you just knew the suit could do anything, if only Ralph could figure the thing out. It was the dawn of the personal computer era—the IBM PC debuted during the show's first season—and the show was a prescient parable for the tension between the fabulous possibilities of technology and our frustrating inability to make it work.
If only Ralph hadn't lost the instructions, right? Here's the thing: good instructions aren't always (or even usually) the answer. No offense to the aliens, but Ralph's super suit had some glaring usability problems, with warning signs you should watch for in your own app design. Tapworthy apps give you a super power, too, helping to make you awesome in some way large or small. When an app is easy to use, it melts naturally and effortlessly into your routine, no extra thought required—instant superhero. Everyone's first outing with your app should be smooth and easy (Ralph's first flight crashes him into a wall). Your app's primary tasks should be easy and obvious to complete with only minor exploration and perhaps the help of some welcome-mat hints for first-timers. In the use-it-quick world of mobile apps, the essentials have to be blindingly simple.
If you find yourself pondering the addition of help screens to explain how to do the basics, you should first revisit your design to figure out how to focus your feature set, reduce visual clutter, highlight primary tasks, and make interface labels more clear. Something's wrong when people constantly stumble when they attempt your app's main tasks and features. At that level, bolting on screens of detailed instructions won't help. To the dismay of technical writers everywhere, most people don't read software instructions, and they don't seek them out. That's doubly true for mobile apps, where people expect fast, frictionless experiences that require little thought and certainly no extra reading.
This doesn't mean you should never offer dedicated help screens, only that they shouldn't be required in order to get started. For deeper apps and nuanced use cases, extra explanation may be required for advanced features. Tips and pointers can help novice users become experts, and it's fine to add help screens to an app's settings area or offer links to a mobile website where people can find tutorials for becoming power users. A drawback to that approach, however, is that it segregates the instructions into a dusty back corner of your app, and people have to be motivated to find them. Don't expect casual users or beginners to stumble across them.
A more convenient approach integrates help into a well-traveled area of the interface. Evernote, for example, offers a Tips tab on its New Note screen as a way to offer suggestions for creative uses of the note-taking app. That treatment is ideal for providing hey-that's-neat pointers for people to graze on from time to time. But it's not well-suited to more basic help that you're more likely to need just once; don't clutter primary screens with elements that people rarely use, if ever.
Figure 7-19. Evernote's New Note screen (left) includes a Tips tab at bottom right. Tapping it summons a sheet detailing an unusual use for the app or an advanced feature (right).
Sometimes there's no getting around it: Some apps require more explanation than a simple introductory note can offer. Apps introducing an unfamiliar concept benefit from taking the audience by the hand to lead them through; an extended version of the welcome-mat technique is an effective approach. Backwords is a fun iPhone parlor game that's tough to explain but simple to play after you run through it just once. Here's the gist: one player records a secret phrase on the microphone out of earshot of the second player. When the second player returns, the app plays the word backward, a distorted and unidentifiable sound. The second player then has to mimic that jumbled sound, growling and chirping into the microphone. (This is generally hilarious.) Finally, Backwords plays that attempt backward and, if the second player did a good job, it sounds somewhat like the first player's original phrase. Score a point if you can guess the original phrase.
Whew. The Backwords gameplay is a case where showing is better than telling. "We had these Backwords parties every weekend during development, and nobody ever wanted to read the instructions during a party or when it was their turn to play," says developer Shadi Muklashy. "They just looked around the room: 'All right, what do I do?'" To help, he added an optional overlay that gave instructions at each step. A big, casual handwritten font keeps the vibe friendly, with the effect of a game show emcee taking you through every stage of the game. Once you've got the hang of the game, a setting lets you turn the instructions off.
