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[matthew.east at breathe.com]

Mary Gardiner writes: 

> On Wed, Apr 20, 2005, matthew.east at breathe.com wrote:
>> My personal view on this the debate currently going on is about 
>> terminology: the people who dislike Frequently Answered Questions pages 
>> tend to advocate nonetheless a structure based around "Common Problems". To 
>> some extent therefore IMO this is a semantic debate, at least in part.
> 
> It's a little more than that for me. The idea is reader's perspective
> versus writer's perspective. 
> 
> As a reader looking to play XYZ music files using Ubuntu, I don't give a
> damn whether not being able to play them is a "common problem" or
> "frequently asked question." All I care about is an answer to the
> question. Therefore, I should *not* go to the front page of any
> documentation tree and be asked to decide between "Common Problems" and
> "Other hardcore stuff" at the top level. Asking me to choose between "I
> want to play music", "I want to watch a video" and "I want to write an
> email" as a first choice is more sensible: it's far more obvious to me
> the reader which choice I make.

I totally agree that a user should be be asked to discover what Common 
Problems are! That is absurd naturally. The point I'm trying to get at is 
that the choice that we have to make, in determining what choices should be 
offered to a user at a top level (I want to watch a video/write an email 
etc) depends on us determining what frequently encountered problems are. I 
get the feeling that we are not in disagreement on this at all. I think this 
is what you mean when you refer to a "writer's point of view". 

> And one side effect of this "useful to the most people thing" is making
> sure that common problems are easy to find answers to. We can do that
> by, for example, reducing the number of clicks required to get to
> popular docs, or by ordering our menu pages based partly on having
> common problems near the top. But the difference is we make the common
> problem documentation easy to get to without ever requiring the user to
> ask themself "is this a common problem?" Instead, they ask themselves
> "is this a music problem?", go to the relevant page, and *just happen*
> to find their problem up the top because it's common. They go through
> the entire process without ever knowing that it's common, just that the
> documentation for it was remarkable easy to find.

Yeah this confirms my suspicion that we're in full agreement. The key 
question for me is getting categories clear enough that users know where to 
click to answer their problems. Obviously reducing the number of clicks is 
nice too. 

Matt