What are we doing wrong?

[Benjamin Humphrey]

Hi guys,

I'd be willing to help as much as I can. I can try to stir up some publicity
in the future, but first we need something in place for people to get
excited about.

I think it *is* too late for Lucid to do an entire re-work of the OS help,
and I normally am one for setting close deadlines!

By re-work I don't mean the *content, *I mean all the points that have been
made here regarding speed, appearance, wording of menu items, promotion,
education, visibility. We need something *new,* something *unique* that
distinguishes OUR help from any other operating system and encourages people
to use it. Martin is on the right track with his ideas.

I'll try to think up some nifty ideas too. We need to take the boring
element out of documentation, and if you guys want publicity, then we need
something big to show, something exciting that people can blog about and go
"Ooo wow." Something that will make new users *confident *to switch to
Ubuntu because they know that the support is fantastic. I'm not saying the *
content* isn't fantastic, but they need to *be aware* of it first before
they can utilize that content!

You've seen how I have managed to get the manual a huge amount of attention,
and really that was all from just a simple *idea* - we didn't really even
have much to show for our work and in only two weeks we were mentioned on
every major Linux site on the net. Imagine what would happen if we started
showing off the new, revamped and re-focussed OS documentation. Radical
thinking guys, radical thinking is what *gets stuff done.*

I'm very, very keen to help out with this.

Cheers,
Benjamin

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 4:19 AM, Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Kelvin,
>
> On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 13:04 +0000, Kelvin Gardiner wrote:
> > I don't think new users think of looking in the system menu. As has been
> > mentioned most people's first thought is to go to Google. Maybe moving
> > the menu entry to above the Software Center menu item may help, so the
> > help item is more visible. Also, may be a link on the desktop for new
> > installs would be good.
>
> I tried it on someone who has never used Ubuntu before and they looked
> in the System menu. Maybe the menu item there doesn't look very
> appealing/useful. I've attached a mockup of how we could modify that.
> There's a "Tutorials" item and a "Fixing Common Problems" item. Let me
> know what you think.
>
> > In terms of promotion. Maybe more promotion would help. But I think that
> > a new project for a single document is probably more attractive, and so
> > will gain more publicity, than updating  the less exciting sounding
> > system docs. It would be good to see the manual promote the existence of
> > and getting involved with the system docs.
>
> We can put the system docs into a single document reasonably easily,
> perhaps with some new material to help it link together better, but
> without duplicating much stuff. I agree that it has attracted a lot of
> publicity, which we should try to use if we can.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Phil
>
> --
> Phil Bull
> https://launchpad.net/people/philbull
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>
>


-- 
Benjamin Humphrey

Ubuntu Manual Project Leader
Dunedin, New Zealand

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual
www.interesting.co.nz
www.benjaminhumphreyphotography.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20100118/98ef35ad/attachment.html>