FB21087352: Inconsistency in terminology between the “AppName Help” menu item and the “AppName User Guide” content title #88
Description
Over the past few years, the content titles displayed in the Tips app (formerly Help Viewer) have changed from “AppName Help” to “AppName User Guide.”
(In the following text, “AppName” is used as a placeholder where actual application names would appear.)
On macOS, applications can bundle their help documentation, which can be opened in the Tips app via the Help > AppName Help menu item.
Previously, there was a consistent context in which selecting Help > AppName Help opened the “App Help” in Help Viewer. However, the current behavior results in several different names appearing: selecting Help > AppName Help now opens “AppName User Guide” in the Tips app.
In particular, the flow of “open AppName Help to view the AppName User Guide” is confusing and can easily lead to user misunderstanding.
For example, if a user is instructed to “open the help from the Help menu,” opening a user guide instead may feel to them as though they opened something other than “Help.”
Conversely, if a user is told to “open the User Guide from the Help menu,” they may not intuitively choose the “AppName Help” menu item, because the wording does not match.
I do not intend here to question the decision to rename the Help Viewer to Tips.
However, I believe that the menu item label and the displayed content name should be consistent.
Therefore, I propose changing the default label the menu item in the Help menu from “AppName Help” to “AppName User Guide.”
Of course, developers can currently change the menu label manually via Storyboard or SwiftUI.
However, I believe that the entry point to user guides should be consistent across macOS itself.
Expected results
The label of the menu item that opens the user guide should match the title of the user guide.
More specifically, the menu item label should be “AppName User Guide.”
Actual results
The user guide’s title is “AppName User Guide,” while the menu item that opens it is labeled “AppName Help.”
Environment
- macOS: Version 26.2 Beta 3 (25C5048a)
- Xcode: Version 26.1.1 (17B100)