USB installation instructions for beginners

[Phil Bull]

Hi Mat,

On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 10:03 +0000, Mat Tomaszewski wrote:
> Can you explain what do you have in mind by "more confident users" and 
> why would they need a "first line" support? Is that decision based on 
> any research or just the discussion within this group (apologies if this 
> is all obvious to everyone here, I may not be up to speed)?

"More confident users" are people who are accustomed to tinkering with
their computer. They have a reasonable level of technical knowledge
(e.g. they know that hard disks are "partitioned"), but won't know the
exact steps required for the installation. A lot of Ubuntu users fall
into this group, I believe. I hope that providing them with a brief
outline-type guide would significantly reduce the time it takes for them
to get Ubuntu up and running on their netbook. They require this
documentation for reasons of convenience - they could find the
information elsewhere, but it would be time-consuming. This would target
what I think will be a big user group, and won't be presented as
technically as it might sound.

This isn't based on any particular research, but I think that writing
decent intermediate-level docs will provide at least a basic level of
coverage that we can then build around for other user groups. It will
also be a good reference for people delivering support (many novice
users rely on more skilled friends/relatives to perform complicated
tasks like installation).

> > Second, a less restricted guide with more hand-holding would be
> > produced. This would include screenshots and a troubleshooting section
> > alongside the main installation sequence. This will cater for novice
> > users.
> 
> This sounds very interesting. Are there any concrete plans outlined 
> somewhere on the wiki already?

No, but I've spoken to another team member about it (Paul) and he seems
keen to help out. I think that a reasonable plan would be to take the
intermediate-level guide (see above) and flesh it out with more details
(e.g. more explicit, finer-grained instructions) and some screenshots.

Thanks,

Phil

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