Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3434 mails)

["Benji Weber" <b.weber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/02/2008, Michael Loeffler <michl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Don't know why it should be a "complete failure" but in regards of
> Documentation and the different channels of communication it gives IMO an
> easy access for newbies. If needed we might list the manuals first and not as
> now as third thing.

Well if you insist.

We have had no evidence of a single person finding the IRC channel via
the help link on the desktop. I have been regularly asking a number of
those who have joined the channel and seem less familiar with IRC
whether they came via help.opensuse.org. I have not yet had anyone who
say they have. Nor have we seen a great increase in people in the
channel since 10.3. Of the interactive support methods mentioned on
help.opensuse.org IRC has the lowest barrier to entry, no registration
or subscription required.

As for why this is I wouldn't like to say without some figures.

Hypothesis 1 - People don't notice the icon on the desktop, or don't
think it's important.

This can only be confirmed or contradicted by study or feedback. Some
of the reviews of 10.3 criticised us for having too many icons on the
desktop, perhaps users are not seeing it amid the others.

Hypothesis 2 - People do investigate the icon on the desktop but get
lost somewhere between help.opensuse.org and IRC/Forum/List.

This could be supported by a large number of hits on
help.opensuse.org, which I expect someone could provide statistics on.

If I were to guess I would go with this one, due to the design of
h.o.o it is 3 clicks from the desktop to connect to IRC. Furthermore
the help options are fairly small on the left, and even on the IRC
page itself the connect link isn't immediately obvious as it is just a
normal textual link and there are 7 others on that page.

Most of these issues were caused by the shoehorning of
help.opensuse.org into the *.o.o website template. Originally it was
intended to be a very simple design similar to the susegreeter, but
started on demand rather than automatically. It was decided to develop
as a static website rather than a Qt app so as to make it easier to
develop/modify/translate while not being strictly tied to the
distribution release cycle. This then led to having to comply with the
website design intended for the real websites which was not really
suited to the help.opensuse.org concept.

However, without more data we can't really make a conclusion. We can
certainly do things differently if we know at what stage the process
is failing. For example we can have rich content embedded into the
desktop itself more easily with KDE4 & plasma.

--
Benjamin Weber
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx