“It's best if the system doesn't need any additional explanation. However, it may be necessary to provide documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks. Help content should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps, and not be too large.” — Jakob Nielsen
Below are six small, working demos. Each one deliberately breaks what help and documentation are supposed to do — findable, relevant, current, and in plain language. Try each one, then click “Reveal what actually happened” to see what good documentation would have done instead.
Every page here has a reassuring “Need help?” link in the corner. Click it and see what happens — which is to say, nothing at all.
You just want to know how to export your data. The help article that opens is a wall of unbroken, unstructured text with no headings and no search — the actual answer is buried in there somewhere.
Try searching this help centre the way an actual person would ask a question. Then try the exact, oddly specific title of the one article that matches. Only one of those works.
Click “Help” from three completely different settings panels. Every single one opens the identical generic help homepage — nothing about where you clicked from changes what you're shown.
The help article tells you to click the gear icon to open Settings. The actual interface was renamed months ago — there is no gear icon anymore, only a “Preferences” button with a completely different icon.
Click for help on this feature and the explanation uses more undefined jargon than the feature itself. “Learn more” only digs the hole deeper — and eventually leads right back to where it started.