Re: Empathy help card sort

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2009-09-04 at 23:29 +0200, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2009/9/4 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > Introduction
> > What is the Salut service?
> >
> > Introduction stood on its own for quite a while, until
> > she couldn't decide where to put Salut.  She said she
> > doesn't know what Salut is, and thought a page like
> > that would probably be linked from the Introduction.
> 
> Hmmm... with the new version of Empathy, Salut is no more, now it's
> "People nearby". I think we need to fix that one, if people search
> help files they will look for "What is People Nearby?" not "What is
> Salut?", we can explain that People Nearby is Salut in that page
> though.
> 
> I'm not still convinced about moving the Salut description even if
> it's buried under another page. Maybe we can add it as an Account
> Details in the Accounts Window .

It was suggested to me by somebody that we ought to have
a descriptive page for each account type.  We'd need to
put thought into why we'd be doing that though.  I don't
want to spend time on that for 2.28.

Now Salut is kind of a different story, because it's one
of those features you don't even know you want until you
know it's there.  So that leaves us with the problem of
trying to put information into the hands of people who
aren't looking for it.

(I think we should add more meat to the Introduction.
Use it to play up cool features.  Just use quick blurbs
and link to further information.  Treat it almost as if
it were marketing copy.)

> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > Status Types and Icons
> 
> OFFTOPIC: Is the capitalization of this title wanted? All the others
> are normal...

So I've been using sentence capitalization for titles that
use a sentence structure, such as those we use for tasks
and problems.  And I've been using header capitalization
for noun phrase titles, which we use for guides, concept,
references, etc.

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon of a technical writer,
but sentence-capitalized noun-phrase titles just really
bother me.

> >(By the way, we should
> > try to have page titles that stand on their own, without
> > the context of the guide page we think they exist on.)
> 
> Need to work on that... but I find it kind of difficult, also because
> users might want to read what they are looking for when they open the
> help...

The thing is, you can't assume users will navigate through
the guides you set up to find the topic.  Think of how it
will look in search results.

> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > Send files
> > Send files over IRC
> >  ---
> 
> Interesting, and true: should we have one single page for sending
> files even if sending them via IRC is not possible and that page is
> really a one line sentence? Or should we add the IRC sending files
> also in the Advanced Actions sections?

I've been tending to allow redundancy with IRC topics.
IRC is a strange beast, and I kind of suspect that most
people who come to Empathy for IRC are already thinking
in terms of IRC.

> > Share your desktop
> >
> > These are two stacks.  But in the end she put them next
> > to each other.  Her reasoning was that instead of sending
> > a file, you'd share your desktop.  OK, if this doesn't
> > make sense to you, it's probably because you make stuff
> > and send it to people.  She's one of those people who
> > sends Word documents back and forth for collaborative
> > editing.
> >
> > This is interesting to me, because it speaks to why she
> > would send files or share her desktop.  To her, these
> > aren't so much goals as they are means to accomplish a
> > goal: collaborative editing.  Ask a dozen other people
> > and you might get a dozen other answers on why they'd
> > do these things.
> 
> Interesting. I think this is information that could be useful for the
> GNOME User Guide and then crosslink from/to Empathy help...

There is no end to the kind of wonder we could be putting
in the User Guide^W^WDesktop Help about both sending files
and desktop sharing.  Let's make sure to keep that in mind
when we start planning.  And let's revisit Empathy to see
if some linkage would be appropriate.

> > So I think the big thing I'm taking away from this is
> > that the current account management guide section on
> > the root guide is off.  It contains pages from three
> > of those stacks: accounts, status, and contacts.  The
> > big thing to me is she put the contacts stack next to
> > the conversations stack, not the accounts stack.  It
> > might be OK to leave accounts and status together.
> 
> > I'm interested to hear others' thoughts on this.
> 
> I think it really make sense to move the accounts related topics into
> a separate section.

Agreed.  That should be a pretty easy change.

> I'm no sure about grouping the conversations topics altogether though,
> text and audio/video. They are conversations after all, but totally
> different ones, it's a different user experience...

I think the current setup for this is OK.  She put the
audio/video conversations stack next to the conversations
stack in the end, because she considered them related,
but it was still a separate stack.

--
Shaun