I am developing a mobile application which has many functionality, and I am pretty sure that the design will confuse the user about how to use some functionality so we decided to include some help as we can see them regularly in desktop applications, but later we found that the help text is too long. We don't think that one screen is enough to describe what a user can do. Moreover the project itself is subjected to evolve based on beta stage and user reports.After a lot of thinking and meetings we have decided three options to show the users what they can do.Create the website or blog, so we can let the users know what they can do with this application, the advantage is that it can provide us a good source of marketing, but for that they have to access the site while most part of the application can be used while being offline in earlier versions.Create a section in the application called demos to show the same thing locally, but we are afraid that it will increase the size, that we think can be avoided (and we are planning to avoid if there is any option)Show popups, but we discarded this thinking that pop ups annoys user no matter what the platform is.I want to know from community that which option will you choose, we are also open to accept other ideas if you have.
Developing a mobile application, how to show help if it contains too much data?
mobile
From my experience there should only be at most three actionable objects on a single screen and the rest should be done with contextual menus that also don't have more than three items. Emulating desktop UI guidelines for a mobile application is usually not a good idea. This is one of the reasons lists are a popular UI item in mobile apps, they present the relevant details and let the user ask for more information if required.