What is a Help Balloon?
One of the earliest innovations in desktop help assistance tools, the help balloon was a simple and fun visual tool that allowed users to pose a question regarding some aspect of a given program, and receive an response from the built in help files included in the software. The designation of the tool as a help balloon was due to the visual similarity of the help balloon to the balloons commonly used in comic strips to provide a visual image of the words being spoken by the characters in the cartoon panel. Designed to be fun to use as well as providing simple to understand answers, the help balloon was praised by some users and panned by others. One of the first examples of a help balloon feature in software was Balloon Help, which was introduced by Apple in the System 7 operating system during the 1980’s. The idea was to make it possible to move a cursor over a button or icon on a tool bar and learn more about what the button would do. The explanation would go a little beyond a quick
