Re: [Usability] Yelp usability issues

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Don Scorgie wrote:

> Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:18:58 +0000
> From: Don Scorgie <DonScorgie Blueyonder co uk>
> To: usability gnome org
> Cc: Doc Devel List <gnome-doc-devel-list gnome org>
> Subject: [Usability] Yelp usability issues
>
> Hi,
>
> Currently we're trying to clean up yelp bugs in bugzilla a little.  In
> there, there are 2 bugs that require input from a usability perspective.
> [1] [2].
>
> These are:
> 1. Should the items in the left-hand side panel of a document
> auto-expand?

Not sure how this is really a Yelp issue, and keynav seems more like of an
accessibility issue than a usability issue (bit it is a grey area).  The
bug report seems to describe list navigation behaviour which should be
decided in GTK in a standard way not decided by an individual application.
Arent' tree list supposed to expand when you hit right arrow?  (It is
interesting though that the user expected + to exand it too, understanable
given how a + icon is used in some themes.)

(I read the report as best I can but there may be subtleties I'm missing
here but I'm a bit short of time to look into it properly and I hope no
one is depending on my humble decidely *non-expert* opinion.)

Despite Shauns belief people read through the documentation I can say I
only dip into the manual selectively skim reading as a last resort
(usually I get stuck asking questions about the usability of the
application and why I would even need to read the manual) and spend as
little time as possible reading documentation so I can get on with
whatever it was I was really trying to do.  Ideally having more hyperlinks
and search (finally!) it will be even easier to jump around documentation
in an entirely non-linear fashion.

> 2. Should pressing / activate find (as well as pressing ctrl-F)?

I'd leave this entirely up to the discretion of the developers.  Keep in
mind however Ctrl+F will always need to be the primary keybinding and only
viewer applications will be able to use slash '/' (as opposed editor
applications) and at best it can only ever be an optional extra.

Maybe it is something which could be included with the optional emacs
style keybindings?

> Any comments would be welcome.

Random comments/question: is there a program which views help like Yelp
and allows you to edit docbook like gedit?  Something like Mozilla
Composer but for Docbook? Anychance Yelp could be made faster, my old
hardware suffers greatly if I try to run Yelp (and no upgrading really is
not cheap or easy but I do accept donations).

- Alan