Designing Effective Database Systems

Chapter 21. User Assistance

In a sense, everything we’ve talked about in Part IV of this book comes under the heading “user assistance.” Your goal in designing the user interface and choosing windows structures and controls should always be to assist users in accomplishing their tasks. Most of the discussion of data integrity in Chapter 19, for example, was couched in terms of your system helping users avoid accidents without getting in their way. In this chapter, we’ll look at more explicit forms of user assistance that you can incorporate into the user interface.

User Levels

We have discussed three categories of people who will be using your systems. Beginning users need to know what the system does. Intermediate users need to know how to perform ...