On Thursday 28 June 2007 13:44, Karl Eichwalder wrote: [Wizard help - yes or no] We had this discussion several times in the past. So far, the pros outweighed the cons each time, so it was decided that we do want that help panel. But one way or the other, one major purpose of a widget like that wizard is to enforce consistency and a uniform look. What we really don't want is every module to look radically different. Consistency is important for usability. Should we decide that we don't want that help panel any more, we will remove it EVERYWHERE and not just in a couple of places. BTW reviewers and journalists tend to like that help panel; it's often explicitly mentioned and praised.
A configuration dialog needs a help text. Always.
Yes, but this does not mean the help text must be visible all the time. And it needs a good and comprehensive help text.
Agreed so far.
In the help, you must explain _all_ widgets, or tell the user where more information is to be found.
Here I strongly disagree. There is no need to explain every single widget. This is tedious to read, and important information easily gets lost on the way. More often than not it's a lot more important to give the user hints and tips or background information. This is where we have room for improvement at many places. For example, I feel a strong desire to strangle somebody when I have to read a help text like "With the [Abort] button you can abort this configuration". That's utterly useless. OTOH I feel just the same desire to strangle somebody when I have to read "Here you can configure XYZ" (and nothing else) in a module that has a headline "XYZ Configuration". Hint: Click through the YaST2 control center and count how many times you can read that kind of thing and no REAL help text. What we need is a short introduction explaining what that "XYZ" is, what it does for the user, in which cases it makes sense to configure that at all (or, sometimes equally important, in which cases it does not make any sense), and sometimes how to obtain the information that is requested (e.g., Internet provider data) or to suggest useful values (if there is no simple predefined setup that does that anyway) or even when to leave the defaults alone. I really don't think we are so short of screen space that we must get rid of that help panel. But some of those help texts certainly could use a little (or not so little) improvement. CU -- Stefan Hundhammer <sh@suse.de> Penguin by conviction. YaST2 Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Nürnberg, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: yast-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: yast-devel+help@opensuse.org