ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Luke,

On Sun, 2010-06-20 at 11:29 +0100, Luke-Jennings wrote:
> The program would provide a place to find and download every document
> produced by the teams that is in a pdf, odp, odt etc file format.

OK, I think I understand what you're trying to do. But why does this
need a separate desktop client? Why can't we just do it through a web
interface? It seems to me that a web interface would be much easier to
manage, and would require much less of a development effort.

> A link could be placed in the appropriate place as well, how ever I
> don't think that would work for the learning teams content, which would
> have several files per "lesson" an example is here [1] 
> Also what about the documents that are not relevant to anything in yelp?
> Viewing help.ubuntu.com in yelp would look very out of place, and
> possibly confuse the user as the pages are very different. Also with the
> ideas to modify the help.ubuntu.com interface, can yelp handle html5?

I agree that the learning team will have different needs, so in-help
links won't normally be suitable.

With regards to help.ubuntu.com looking out of place in Yelp: We can
easily change the stylesheet when viewing in Yelp, so it needn't look
out of place.

IIRC, Yelp uses Gecko to render pages, so if Gecko supports HTML5, so
should Yelp.

> I think with the correct publicity people would find the program very
> useful. Also with locos etc also producing documentation the future plan
> to make it so that locos can add custom feeds would help bring all the
> documentation together. Future features like a search function would
> make documents easier to find and adding a rating system would show
> which documents are the most liked. People could use it alongside irc
> lessons and lernid. 

I'm worried about confusing users. If they go to the System menu and
find two options, "Help and Support Centre" and "Documentation library",
they're not going to find it obvious which one to choose. We risk
sending some people to a place where they have to trawl through several
documents trying to find what they're looking for, when they could have
just opened Yelp and found it straight away. Equally, we risk sending
people to the help centre and not finding the training materials they
want. From our "developer's" perspective, aggregating documentation (and
having a separate documentation library and help centre) sounds like a
good idea, but does that make sense to users? Will users see the
distinction?

I think we have to be really careful when considering use cases here.
I'm a desktop help guy, so I'm most interested in users who have a
specific problem. My aim is to help them solve that problem ASAP. From
your proposal, I'm guessing you're more interested in the training side
of things. As it is, I think your proposal will work well for people
looking for training, but it'll hamper those looking for help. What I
want to do is make sure that both user groups are satisfied.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull