I have the job of building a help system for a not-too-easy-to-use saas application.
I am restricted insofar as I cannot make changes to the code or layout of the system.
Right now there is a very high learning curve to use the system.
Where can i learn about the best practices for explaining how to use an online service?
Does an interactive forum outperform a deep FAQ? Any services, like Zendesk, that you guys recommend?
Where should i start?
To accomplish this, we've created a custom theme/layout that renders the help categories in a JQuery tree plugin on a left sidebar , search on top and content on the right column.
The effort was about 2-3 days for one frontend developer and the results were quite good, so I highly suggest going this route unless you have other restrictions.