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Joe Welinske: Hi, I'm Joe Welinske. Today I want to talk
about the user assistance in a mobile app. It's an area that I'm always interested in.
The app that I want to talk about has put together a very interesting tutorial. The
company is ArchiTech. Let me just bring that up and give you a little tour.
I mentioned the name of the tool is ArchiTech. This is a Windows Phone application, and it's
unfortunately kind of hard to find robust apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, but
this is definitely one of them. It is essentially a CAD and drawing program, and it has a lot
of powerful features in it. With Windows Phone you can get it from the Marketplace, it's
$1.99, but there's also the typical free or a free trial of the app.
If you want to just check out some screen captures of what it can do, you can go to
the Marketplace site and take a look at the screen shots or the different drawings that
are available. The product has a lot of controls to it. It's pretty amazing the level of drawings
that you can do from this mobile device, as well as view other drawings that you've already
put together. Let me switch over to the app itself. Here
I have ArchiTech set up on Windows phone, it's the icon up at the top right, select
that. First thing that appears is a screen asking if I want to take a tutorial. I'd like
to show you a short tutorial at first. "Are you interested", "Yes Please," or "No Thanks,"
"Don't show this message again." I'll select "Yes Please." It starts to show the UI of
the application, and then the first thing that comes up is a panel with information
about the tool bar. So it has a "1 toolbar", and then it has some instructions about working
with the tool bar. I can scroll to the next panel, which is about
Creation, then Modification and it continues on that way. There's quite a lot of tutorial
panels; Text, Lines, Architecture, Interior, Colors, Moving, Scaling, Rotating, Mirroring,
CAD buttons, Delete Objects, Zooming, Undo/Redo, and then I'm back to the Tool Bar. An interesting
addition to that is that for each one of these cards that appears as an overlay, I can now
go vertically for additional information. Here on Tool Bar, I'm now going to go and
scroll down to see additional information about the Tool Bar. If I go over to Creation,
similarly I can go down to get more information about Creation, Modification, some more information
about Modification. This help system has created a situation where you have a lot of information
by the way that they've set it out in this array.
Now, I'll take a little bit of a closer look at some of these panels, so here is "#5 Text".
As I scroll through, you can see a little bit more of the detail.
[Silence as the speaker shows a touch demo] There are a few frames where you see a literal
representation of a finger. Now, from the tutorial, if I press the Back button to go
back to the Main User Interface, I can then go to the More button and there's a tutorial
choice. So it is possible to get back to it after you've used it the first time if you've
chosen to not see it again, there it is. All right. Hopefully you've found that interesting.
Good luck with all of your projects. Thank you.