Mobile Help With Mallard

Don’t want to read? Skip to the Mobile Mallard demo.

As people use more and more mobile devices, it’s important that we can deliver help in a way that feels comfortable to users. It’s not just about help for mobile apps. Look at any book on documentation from the 80s or 90s and you’ll see an example about a field technician using documentation differently than an office worker. But now people are increasingy using phones and tablets to read documentation for everything, including devices in the world around them.

Mallard is already a natural choice for creating help to deliver on mobile platforms. Its focus on small, focused topics and its decidedly non-book-like navigation structure fit comfortably on a small screen, and its minimalist structured markup means you can easily adapt it to new needs without carrying a bunch of legacy baggage.

But the design we use for large, mouse-driven screens don’t always feel right on small, finger-driven devices. We use multi-column links that feel scrunched on small screens. We have purely decorative link previews on hover that you can’t even get to with your finger. We have margins and padding that are refreshing on large displays, but they just keep you from seeing more content on your phone. Luckily, Mallard doesn’t specify these kinds of presentation details, so we can make help that adapts to the form factor you’re viewing it on.

Check out the Mobile Mallard demo to see the initial work on making Mallard documents more suitable for mobile devices. This is still very early work, and it needs a lot of real-world testing. The next step is to use Mallard conditional processing to allow you to actually control what content is shown on mobile devices.