Re: Quick Help

[<jfleck inkstain net>]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Dan Mueth wrote:

> 
> -----
> GNOME Quick Help
> 
> GNOME Quick Help would roughly be a clone of the simple help system found
> on Windows and some other systems.  The main purpose would be to quickly
> find simple instructions on how to do something.  (As opposed to our
> current help system which provides complete, detailed documentation: pages
> of text sorted into sections with screenshots, etc.)  Each help "item" is
> basically a FAQ item.  So each item in its index would be something like
> "Moving a Panel" or "Sound Volume: Changing".  When selected, it would
> show a few very simple and short instructions on how to do the particular
> item.  No screenshots.  No pages of text.  Just a short and simple set of
> instructions your Mom could follow.
> 

I strongly support this idea.

I have become concerned that we are spending energy building our help
system around detailed explanations of applications rather than around
user tasks.

If my question is, "how do I display disk usage," my options are:

a) read the users guide
b) guess what application or applet might do this based on its name and
then fire it up and read its user manual (or read the manual directly
through whatever help browser might work on my machine)

I'd like there to be a

c) look it up in an index of all the help on my machine, and find the 
kind of quick, task-oriented help Dan is talking about along with a link
to the full applet/application documentation.

I believe it's important in doing this that we have help from those
experienced in the dark art of indexing, so that we have a maximally
useful index offering many different points of entry into the Quick Help.

Cheers,

John