Better link for Ubuntu Help on the startpage.

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

I just read an interesting blog post about a sixty year old who used a
computer for the first time.
(http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/user-testing-in-the-wild-joes-first-computer-encounter/)
He tried to get started, but couldn't find a way to easily get help.
To me, it was fairly obvious that a clearly visible link to a help
page on the start page would've been very helpful to him. So I had a
look, and sure enough, we have one.

But that link points to https://help.ubuntu.com/. That means that the
user needs to first choose his version. He might not know that.
However, we do, so we should link directly to the version the user has
installed and directly to desktop, so the link should have pointed to
https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-help/index.html in 11.04.

That page has a small notice at the bottom: «This help applies if you
are using the default Unity desktop. Help is also available for the
Ubuntu Classic desktop session.» We know what shell the user uses. The
user might not. We should have a way to point the user in the right
direction at once.

In this particular case, the user was trying to use the web. First of
all, he needed help using the browser, but then he would need some
help understanding the web itself. I think that might have been a nice
thing to have. I had a look for that in the help site and I eventually
arrived at this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-help/net-browser.html. It
explains how to Switch to another browser and how to install Java,
Silverlight and Flash. But it does not explain how to browse the web.
That seems to me a fairly obvious topic to have. That would've been
frustrating to Joe from the test.

In other words; there is room for improvement.

I realize that it's a bit too late to fix this in 11.04, but if we
could make this happen for 11.10 and all future versions, I think it
would be a usability improvement. It would also be very nice if that
page was translated into more languages and was used by default for
the users current language settings. Is anyone working on that?

Jo-Erlend Schinstad