Foul Writer’s World

It seems Adobe have really hit a chord with the new help system included in CS4. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the right chord. Richard Galvan (Product Manager for Flash), has included the following post including problems Adobe is working on fixing for Flash CS4. It seems the help system is the centre of a lot of user frustration:

Next topic: Flash Help.

We have received a lot of feedback regarding the changes made to Help. These changes resulted from an internal initiative to make Flash Help consistent with the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite products. These changes also allow the group responsible for developing Help documentation to produce better and more current content. The Help team also wanted to tie in community-based resources and the ability to search, which means that search now returns help results  not only from Adobe, but from other relevant sources on the web.

We are aware that there are severe workflow issues with the current solution –most of which Adobe is working on.  Some of the concerns we have heard are:

• it’s available only when you are online.

• Help now opens in a browser and not in the IDE.

• it opens a different browser window every time you hit F1.

The Help team has assured us that they are working on these issues and on improving the Help experience for the Flash user’s needs.

Please let us know what other issue you encounter with Help. Additionally, if you have any feedback on improving Help to make help better, we are all ears.

If you refer to some of the comments on the post. It seems people really don’t like the new all in one integrated solution that Adobe has implemented. I use Flash CS4 a lot and I must admit that I do find the help frustrating, but to be fair it is not only Flash that has this problem it is most of the CS4 range. As the help has been integrated across the whole platform and is hosted on a centralized server.

This leaves a number of problems some of which have already been brought up by other users:

• Can’t access the help when not on-line (I work a lot on the road while travelling on Trains or in Planes so it can sometimes be frustrating)
• Help no longer feels like part of the application (It opens in a browser window)
• Searched results often cause information overload. The search results obviously go back to an indexing server that automatically searches all the help across the range of applications and provides all these results to the user (Why would I be interested in similar information from other applications in the range. I want help with Flash, plain and simple)

However, the new system does provide the opportunity for the writers to update the system and keep the information up to date easily. Also, this system does reduce the footprint of the applications and for a product range the size of the CS4 Master Collection it really does make a difference on hard drive space..

Thankfully all the problems people seem to have with help seem fixable. I hope the guys at Adobe can improve the help system.

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