On Friday 04 April 2008 02:39, Ricardo Cruz wrote:
You guys mentioned tooltips, and I'm not really sure it's a good idea. I don't think it's usable and developers tend to neglect them, which just makes the situation worse, because users never know what has some help and what hasn't. Better to focus on enriching help as it is, with information and navigability.
Tool tips serve another purpose. They describe individual widgets, not the dialog as a whole or background information about the technology the user is about to configure or helpful tips. That is the stuff I'd like to see in help texts. IMHO things like "Enter your user name here" for an input field labeled "User name" is useless (and often enough an insult to the user's intelligence).
Possibly, what we could do is to set a link from fields to some anchor in the documentation.
While I do think that we can manage that in the installed system (browser etc. available), I have doubts if this would ever work out right to coordinate all those things with the documentation people.
When the user presses the tooltip button, we show part of the help from there, cut with a "More" button that takes the user to the help dialog. Seems like a simpler solution, and better for the user because it would be better integrated with the rest of the documentation.
Think about the installation, too. We are very limited with what we can do there. In particular, putting all the doc PDFs for all the languages into the inst-sys would be very painful. And getting the required browsers there, too.
Important remarks about some field or the dialog in general should simply be visible in the interface, as a label (maybe with a icon to go with it).
I beg to differ. Look at most web apps. They are crowded with text that is mostly useless. All this does is teach users to generously skip small-print text and to read headlines only. So that stuff fills up the screen, yet it does not fulfil its primary objective: To improve usability. BTW MS Win has been going the same way for a while. They manage to write a windowful of meaningless blurb for one or two input fields or check boxes. Nobody wants to or can read that amount of text while doing some sysadmin task; users just read the headlines and click "Next", hoping that everything will be well. Static text in dialogs should be minimized. Many users feel compelled to read every piece of text there, and putting help texts into the main dialogs would force them to read even more. Until they learn to skip that stuff in a wholesale manner - see above. 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