What are we doing wrong?

Phil Bull philbull at gmail.com
Sun Jan 17 20:21:01 UTC 2010


Hi Dylan,

On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 10:36 -0800, Dylan McCall wrote:
>       * The Help and Support launcher is nestled between items people
>         looking for help care nothing about. What is the "and Support"
>         part, anyway?

Something like this, maybe?

http://sites.google.com/site/philbull02/HelpMenu.png

>       * The landing page looks ugly. I can see why someone would
>         automatically assume the worst and seek out other documentation.
>         The Mallard project is making great leaps to improve the look
>         and (more importantly) the feel of documentation around the
>         desktop, so there is hope if that move happens quickly (and
>         properly). Some issues:
[...]

I agree. Mallard would make it pretty trivial to fix all this stuff. We
wouldn't have a special index page which we need to keep updated, it
would look better, the guide page links have descriptions which help
people to navigate, and structuring the whole thing is insanely easy.
Take a look at this:

http://sites.google.com/site/philbull02/indexmockup.tar.gz

I'm confident that we could port over to Mallard this release, if the
translation infrastructure can handle it. What do people think?

> Oh, Yelp is also insanely slow and a source of many support questions
> itself when it starts eating every resource it can find and spitting out
> nothing in return. A big distro needs to commit serious technical
> resources to this. There is work going on to port Yelp to use Webkit
> (which will help), but the search system also needs a lot of work. As it
> is, following the only immediate advice in the landing page  (“To find
> help, insert a keyword in the search bar” - ‘never mind the nicely done
> topics on the left, subject yourselves to the ugly search system’)
> caused Yelp to hang indefinitely and chew up my processor until I
> manually killed it from the terminal. (xkill missed a spot).

I seem to remember someone saying that the Info page backend in Yelp
causes a lot of the performance problems. It can be turned-off with a
compile-time switch. Is anyone interested in investigating this?

> Anyway, I guess the short version of this is: Body text, folks, body
> text! You can't grab peoples' attention, or for that matter help them,
> by sending them along a seemingly endless chain of links (each described
> by about 4 words) that gradually loses relevance to their original query
> as they click along.

Again, Mallard makes this easier. You get a breadcrumb bar at the top of
the page, and the linking pages that you write are much easier to
follow.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull





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