I’ll have to disagree slightly with that. There are different scopes of help content you can make. If we go by the Diátaxis model, it’s tutorials, how-to guides, references and explanations.
Tutorials probably have a place to be linked in the app itself, such that if you go in on a page with the intent “I want to learn how this works”, you can learn it, even if the page isn’t self-explanatory. Perhaps even a tutorial center which essentially lets you complete a course on the software if you wish.
The other 3 categories I take some issue with.
If I go to the category settings page, there might be 20 different things I’d want to do. Putting a how-to guide there would result in a list I’d have to search - and because I have an expectation that what I’m out for won’t necessarily have a dedicated how-to article, I’ll probably type that question into Google instead of searching through the list.
Off-site references are a bane I have to deal with daily. We have a “reference manual” which will tell you what each slider and button does, down to:
Cancel button: Closes the dialog without applying changes
OK button: Closes the dialog, applying the changes
Using this reference means you have to scroll past a lot of technical stuff before you get to your section, when what you really needed is a tooltip which rephrases an option in a few more words.
If I try to delete a category, the current behavior is almost desirable. I see the button, usually greyed out but with a questionmark, and if I click it, it says:
Can’t delete this category because it has sub-categories.
or:
Can’t delete this category because it has 25852 topics. Oldest topic is…
The behavior is good, I know what’s wrong and what my next step is - delete a bunch of posts and subcategories. It would not be improved by linking to the “delete a category” how-to guide instead.
Of course, it still is a band-aid fix to the real problem: Why doesn’t it let me delete a category with posts in it? I can delete folders with subfolders and files on my system, why can’t I delete categories with subcategories and posts? If it didn’t have these weird restrictions, there wouldn’t be a need for a how-to guide in the app to begin with.
And lastly, explanations - that is what the “understanding trust levels” blogpost is. When I first encountered it, it was pretty confusing - “is a random blogpost from 6 years ago really the best you have as documentation?” - and it links out to a reference article which lists out all the things in a table, which was more in line with what I expected (though not sorted in the way I expected). Explanations do not help me figure out a task directly, so putting them in a place where a task would be completed doesn’t work too well.
I think that ultimately, while documentation is important in a few places (eg onboarding, or in instances where design fails), it really is the design which should be the primary focus. Reading or watching a video in which someone explains the website to you rarely is the desired experience.
