Re: [Usability] Recommended HIG providing additional info/help

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 18:38 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 14:18, Age Bosma wrote:
> 
> > So far I have seen about 3 different solutions to this problem:
> > - Add (too much) text near a setting
> > - Providing a tooltip on input field mouseover
> > - Using a "location aware" help button
> 
> Historically, the GNOME documentation team have been opposed to adding
> help text in a dialog, and the recommended method has therefore been to
> add a left-aligned "Help" button to alerts and dialogs that need it,
> which opens (hopefully useful) help about the current dialog.  Help
> about application-level windows is supposed to be obtained via the Help
> menu.

I never thought it was so much the GDP that opposes this.  Overloading
the interface with lots of explanatory text makes it cumbersome to use
once you've learned some of the interface.  It certainly isn't out of
some queer obsession to keep documentation pure that we don't do this.
At least, I've never taken that stance.

Clearly, though, there are situations where more explanatory text is
better.  Generally speaking, these are the wizard(/guru/assistant)-style
interfaces.  And these should be reserved for things users don't have to
do all too often, because it does get annoying.

We have a few such interfaces in Gnome.  Notably, I think that Bug Buddy
would benefit from explaining more in the interface (even though the Bug
Buddy documentation is quite good, if I do say so myself).

More to the point, I think Age mostly wants to know why the HIG doesn't
have any recommendations on user-activated context-sensitive help.  If
you look at Gnome applications, you don't really see any.  The reason
Gnome apps don't do it is that none of our UI libraries have an API to
do it.

And that's likely the reason the HIG makes little or no mention of it.
The HIG makes concrete recommendations based on what you can do today
using GTK+ and friends.  As long as there's no clear API for this, I
doubt the HIG is going to start pushing it.


So Age, what we need is an eager young hacker to take the reins.  Help
tools are a blast to work on, and context-sensitive help tools have some
unique and interesting challenges.  I have some ideas on how such things
should work, but I just don't have the time to implement this right now.

If you've been itching to get involved with free software, now's the
perfect opportunity.

--
Shaun