Help features are typically only used as a last resort. Whether it be an electronic appliance or a web application, most users will not read instructions until they feel stuck, and even then they might not. There are two key reasons for this:

• Firstly, due to prior experience users often regard help as unhelpful. Masses of text and pages of irrelevant FAQs have led them to simply ignore it.
• Secondly, as usability continues to improve, users are learning to rely on their own intuition. They expect to be able to self-serve and navigate through a website themselves, so requesting help seems to have become associated with ego depletion.

You might wonder if that makes help features redundant, but we know that users still need help. So the challenge is finding a better way, or ways, of providing it. In this article, we will discuss the helpfulness of some familiar help features from the perspective of how the user gets the help – is it pushed towards them or do they need to seek it out and pull it for themselves? We call this Push and Pull help:
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