On Sunday 11 November 2007 09:52:32 am Sven Burmeister wrote:
Hello!
Please perform the following experiment:
Take somebody you know and never has been to www.opensuse.org before. Tell him to find help/support on that site. Stop the time until the user finds the links to help/support. My guess: it takes ages to even get to the page where one could find it because the frontpage does not even mention support/help and wiki is not a synonym for those words.
Take the same person and stop the time until he finds help/support on www.ubuntu.com.
Compare both sites' performance.
Tell that person that one has to click on wiki, stop the time until the person finds help/support on the following page. My guess: it takes ages because help is only mentioned once and as a tiny, tiny link and that link does not even link to helo/support but to download-help.
It is interesting mental experiment, where you came to common sense conclusion. I agree that for visitor that want to see what is openSUSE about and what kind of support is offered it will be hard to find any link with words help or support.
Sorry to be that sarcastic, but one could think that opensuse.org maintainers do not expect a lot of users to come to this site looking for help.
The ideas about organization come from all maintainers, and there I can see one person more, you. Yes, anyone showing more interest in openSUSE wiki, like you right now is maintainer. Though, Novell has responsibility to keep content on their servers within legal limits. To ensure that they have their employees at final stage of implementation.
My suggestion, put a big fat icon on the frontpage and the following that displays a question-mark and a link below it that states: help/support.
Big fat icon is in style with modern GUI that suffer from too many icons, and designers should start thinking about using Chinese or Japanese characters instead of icons, at least some people will have easy job to understand commands without popups. I would vote for a big fat written words "Help and Support". That can be liked to page that will offer free and for pay options.
In fact help on opensuse.org is artificially split into communicate and documentation both not being as straight forward as a simple big icon and the two words/help/support.
Well, this is not artificial if you don't think that they are only for help. They contain help options, but they are used for other purposes, so they will persist. -- Regards, Rajko. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org