Yelp Frontpage / Common Questions (was Re: What are we doing wrong?)

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Matthew East wrote on 20/01/10 03:22:
>...
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> 
>>      * The Help and Support launcher is nestled between items people
>>        looking for help care nothing about. What is the "and Support"
>>        part, anyway?
> 
> The "Support" bit is supposed to relate to the ability of users to get
> technical support from others through the free or commercial services
> offered by the Ubuntu community and Canonical. However I agree that
> the words are probably redundant and should be removed. Copying mpt
> for any thoughts he has.

The words "and Support" were added in Ubuntu 7.04, in exchange for
removing separate "Community Support" and "Paid Support" menu items. The
rationale was that people won't know whether they need support (whether
community or paid) until they find out that the help doesn't answer
their problem. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpAndSupportAccess>

Without those words, it might not be obvious that you can access support
from that menu item.

> Someone else on the thread suggested whether the help link should be
> in the Applications menu instead - it would be interesting to hear
> people's thoughts on where people are likely to look if they are
> looking for onboard help (aside from the internet). My personal
> feeling is that the question mark launcher in the panel would be the
> first place (I doubt new users would remove such icons), but after
> that the Applications menu might be the next one. If there are any
> usability studies on this, that would be very interesting to know.

There are not any studies on this, as far as I know. But I think that
help is not (or should not) be seen as an "application", but rather as
an integral part of the environment.

>...
> I've sent a patch to bug 84853 which deals with the initial issue of
> removing the "Enabling visual effects" link from the frontpage.
> However I think we should do a re-evaluation of these links for lucid
> and am interested in any ideas people have about how we can gather
> information about what people's most common problems really are. mpt:
> do the usability studies you've done have any information on this?
>...

Unfortunately not.

You go on to suggest a couple of good sources of common questions: the
Ubuntu Forums and Launchpad Answers. You might also benefit from
collecting questions from less enthusiast-type sources:
*   <http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=ubuntu>
*   <http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/ubuntu>
*   <http://www.ubun2.com/>

Cheers
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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