ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Luke-Jennings <ubuntujenkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Phil,

Lets just add a page to help.ubuntu.com I will try and learn how to go
about it in the next few weeks.

Luke


On Sun, 2010-06-20 at 12:13 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> 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
>