On Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:00:18 +0200, Caig wrote:
Really worried about the documentation area as a whole, and the wiki particularly. It's really difficult to find what you search for if you don't know your way.
Modern thinking about documentation is very different than the traditional "installation guide/reference guide" sort of stuff. Most users don't want to read a user guide from cover to cover these days - they want help for the task at hand, rather than to try to absorb a firehose of information all at once from a guide and then to try to apply it to a live system. It's almost like a "tutorial mode" within the DE might be more useful. This is similar to a trend that's seen in support as well - customers and users don't want to research an answer, they just want to ask about it. In the forums, we see the same questions over and over (that's how I got started in support forums 20+ years ago anyways - I didn't really know anything special, I just saw questions that had already been asked and answered, and I remembered the answers I'd seen), rather than people reading the sticky posts that already have their questions answered. And it's far, far worse on Facebook, where there's no structure or anything - but users want to ask questions there regardless of the fact that they're not helping populate a knowledge base. They just want their question answered, regardless of who has to spend time answering the same questions multiple times. It's all about convenience. Coming back to documentation, the same thing applies. Good documentation is paired with good UX design, where the UI is intuitive and not needing descriptive text (after all, who doesn't know that a password field is "where you enter your password" - but so much documentation actually spells that out). It needs to be task- oriented, and ideally locatable at the time that it's needed. Of course, for a single application, that's not a big issue to sort out. For an entire operating system, that's another matter entirely. I'm not sure how you solve that, unless you have an interactive tour of each DE (or each of the popular DEs). Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org