When do we need help text?

When communicating with users, it's crucial to use clear, simple language without jargon. This ensures that everyone can easily understand the content. Help text needs to be used sparingly, it should not appear with every question.  

However, there are some situations where you have no choice but to provide some extra guidance: 

• Explaining jargon and acronyms: Sometimes you have to use complex terms and acronyms which may be unfamiliar to users.  
• Providing context: We may sometimes have to ask questions that might not seem relevant to the process, it can be useful to provide additional context or background information to help users understand the significance and purpose of the question. i.e. Why are we asking you this?  
• Addressing FAQs: Sometimes our users have common queries about certain aspects of a process. Quickly answering those questions can give the user confidence and keep them on track. 

Help text in forms

When including help text in origination forms, you can start by using the hint text position, which is constantly visible below the label. Hint text should be short, if the content you need to include is lengthy, you can link to further information. The hint text area should also contain any guidance required for how to format the input. 

The pattern we recommend when you want to display further information alongside a field, is a link that sits with the hint text of the component. This approach provides a larger hit target, and can either a) trigger a Popover, or b) link to a glossary or other full explanation that’s somewhere else.  

Using the label ‘Learn more’ is a good, generic approach for triggering help text. The fact that it is sitting with its field can provide the context, however, to ensure an accessible experience, you can use aria-labels to provide extra context, for example the visible link would say "Learn more" but for screen readers, it would be announced as "Learn more about off-set accounts” 

If you are using help text to provide definitions for complex terms, or spelling out an acronym the help link can say ‘What is an ABN?', for example. 

Here are some examples:

Using icons for help

In most cases, using links for Help text makes the most sense, as icons alone are not obvious enough, have a small touch target size, and require extra labelling for accessibility. However, there are some instances when using an icon alone to trigger help text does makes sense.

The decision to use an icon can be steered by how obvious you can make the icon without disrupting the design. A good example of where this works well is within a complex interface, where having a paragraph of explanatory text or lots of extra links does not make sense for the activity. This is usually the case for complex staff facing screens. The universally understood icon we suggest is the (?). 

Here is an example:

Why use help text

Using help text correctly and carefully can significantly increase a user's confidence when working through a complex process. It can quickly answer those questions that may pop into their heads throughout, keeping them on track.  

For the best experience, consult an accessibility manager when including help text in your project.