The Problem
The Help & Support page is both a section index and a section in its own right. Therefore where should it appear in the tabbed navigation?

Thanks to bradley8131 for raising this issue in the forums.

The (possible) Solution(s)

1. Don’t change anything and let users work out that they need to click on the ‘Help & Support’ tab to get back to the help index.
2. Add a ‘Help & Support’ as a section alongside ‘Service Status’, ‘Help Assistant’ and ‘My Questions’
3. Add an image link to the help pages index in the right column similar to the current link to ‘Help Assistant’
4. Create a new Help & Support section index that links off to each of the sub sections (of which the current help pages index would be a new one).

Unfortunately none of these are fully satisfactory.

The first option requires users to think too much and we all know that’s not a good idea!

The second creates two links that point to the same page and would be very confusing.

The third would take up a lot of room if it has to be present on every page.

The last option is the most logical and is consistent with the way the rest of the site is organised but unless it adds something useful then the index page just becomes an obstacle to reaching the support pages quickly. Eventually we plan to create a new help section index page that summarises your open tickets/questions and attempts to predict what you are looking for based on your viewing history… but we’re not there yet.

So over to you. What do you suggest?

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This entry was posted by Tamlyn Rhodes on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 11:01 am and is tagged with Support, Usability and is posted in the category Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.