An On-Line Help System

1994, The Norfolk-Southern Corporation

The Help System main window. Click for more information.

Problem

Create a help system for an existing, complex, custom-built Macintosh product: Norfolk-Southern's Interline Settlement System (the ISS).

The end users were accustomed to using a mainframe system, and were unfamiliar with the Macintosh. Therefore, the help system had these goals:

• It should be easy for end-users to navigate.
• It should help familiarize end-users with both the ISS and the Macintosh as a whole.
• It should be easy for supervisors to add new Help topics and modify existing ones.

Solution

The Help system, shown above, was part of a Macintosh front end to a 30-year-old mainframe environment. I chose to model the Help System after the Macintosh's Finder interface, hoping to reduce learning time for both the end users and the managers.

The Help System, in Edit mode. Click for more information.

To make it easy for managers to add or modify information in the system, a icon would appear in the upper-right corner when the user logged in with Supervisor privileges. Clicking that icon moved the system into Edit mode, shown at left.

The Help system has several layers of reusable user-interface components and class structures, including a self-organizing Topic hierarchy and a programmable spreadsheet.