The Application System/400 help facility—-sign philosophy and considerations

The design of the Application System/400™ (AS/400™) system help facility was based on the philosophy that users must be able to quickly access the specific information needed to complete their immediate task. This philosophy, reinforced by experience with help information on earlier IBM systems, resulted in a modular help facility that provides two major types of assistance discussed in this paper. Contextual information based on cursor position is provided for each panel. This contextual help is supplemented by an index of how-to-do-it and what-it-means information that can be searched by users in their own words.