current and future help

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

Hi all,

as you may or may not know, we (mainly Jakub and me, so far) have
starte to work on a 'Getting Started' document in the
gnome-getting-started-docs repository. It is a bit different in style
from our other docs, since it is pretty heavy on videos, but it does
use Mallard and we'll show it using yelp, the first time you log in,
coming from gnome-initial-setup.

We've recently done a review of this work, and in the context of that
review we've also looked at our other docs and our release notes. As a
result, Jon McCann has started this page
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Help. it collects some ideas for
how we could make all these efforts more unified and useful. While the
page is currently pretty bare, you can see a few things there that
we'd like to change.

For yelp:

- should use the same patterns as other GNOME 3 applications

- the combined search/title/bookmark entry is too prominent and makes
the window look like a web browser - I wouldn't be surprised if people
typed urls into the entry

- the default size of the yelp window is too small

For our current documentation, we have lots of great content, but the
starting page is a bit problematic:

- the changing thumbnails on hover feel too gimmicky (and the
thumbnails are not even the same size)

- the 3x3 grid below has far too much in it - it feels like it is
trying to cover everything, instead of focusing on the important

- we should also stop using the term 'Desktop'  and just call it what
it is: 'GNOME Help'

Jon's mockup show an idea how we could combine 'whats new' (ie release
notes), 'getting started' (similar to what we're putting together in
gnome-getting-started-docs) and 'common tasks' in an initial page.


Let me know what you think.

Matthias