I'm implementing context help for my accounting application. I wanted to do this as I see that some of my creations was misused in my previous attempt of writing my software. The technical part was easy to do - give all elements in the page an id, peak at all events on the page, fetch id and do context help based on it.

Though how should it look?

I did some googling for an answer, and was surprised only to find pages on how to make the context help, no best practices. Are we programmers really that bad at designing UI? Here's my take on it though:

- It should not be a tooltip. Tooltips are in the way and they are often tricky to trigger.
- It should not be too flashy.
- I want it to be "turned on" and keep provide hints until I turn it off.
- The hint it provides should be visible until some other hint overwrites it.
- Moving the mouse over the page should not make the hint flash over and over again.

I have implemented a help box that show the text all the time. It isn't very flashy - it looks like some information you would want to read. The forms I have on my pages are not that wide so on my screen I have enough room for some extra help to the right. I set up a timer that polls status of help text every second and update only if there is a change. This looks good, but is it really any good ?