Re: Yelp

[Patrick Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

As it stands now, I think that the Help browser tries to cover too much
with a single approach. Different types of information are displayed at the
same level of accessibility. Ideally, we need a documentation browser that
will differentiate between "online documentation", i.e. large books that
are viewable online and printable, and "Help", i.e. short blasts of
essential information. Different tabbed sections would be one way to deal
with this need. One tabbed section could be an Online Library, with
complete books such as the user guide and the accessibility guide. The
other tabbed section would contain Help only. Although primarily thinking
about the ordinary user, there could also be an advanced users tab
containing, for example, system admin guide, programming guides and
developer documentation. 

People might not want to print Help, where they are looking for quick
answers to immediate problems, but they do want to print larger guides for
occasional reference. By separating out the different types of information,
we would already be going some way towards addressing the user different
user needs. 

Pat

Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 13:13, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to build solid infastructure here for more than just the help
> > files of the CD player.  Did any of these usability tests involve having
> > systems administrators looking at the the sysadmin guide?  Or developers
> > looking at an API reference?  Or somebody looking at the manual for her
> > digital camera?
> 
> I've been involved with a study involving developers and end users
> anyway, with content appropriate to their domain.  At that point we were
> concentrating more on the browser's features than in the context in
> which it was used, though.
> 
> >From what I remember, the developers were more interested in cute ways
> of saving and copying/pasting things like scripts and code samples than
> in printing them out for future reference.  And the end users were more
> interested in having the application designed better so they never had
> to go near any online help in the first place, and in having good
> bookmarking facilities just in case they did...
> 
> Of course that's absolutely not to say that the same necessarily applies
> to the wider range of people you're trying to support here (I don't
> recall us including anything akin to API docs for example, which is the
> sort of thing I'd probably want a hard copy of myself).  I was just
> commenting that printing really hasn't been up there on the list of
> users' must-haves any time I've seen usability tests of anything to do
> with online documentation.
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> --
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
> http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
> 
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Patrick Costello, GNOME Documentation
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