UDS session updates

[Jim Campbell]

Hey All,

I just wanted to provide a brief update on how things are going at UDS.

I had the Ubuntu Strategy talk yesterday, and we had some fairly good
attendance. I didn't get quite all of the input that I was hoping to get,
but it was still pretty good. The notes are available here:
http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/desktop-o-ubuntu-docs-strategy/ . I
was hoping to get people in from design, server, packaging, and a11y groups,
but it didn't turn out that way. I'll see if I can get more input from folks
throughout the week.

One thing that strikes me about being here thus far is the number of people
and teams that talk about issues with their team wikis. There is also the
ongoing need to get more contributors for all of the teams.

It isn't practical for us to write wiki pages for teams, but maybe we can
work on our own wiki pages with the goal of offering them up as examples for
other teams. For example, if you're putting together a "getting involved,"
page, how might you want to structure it and what kinds of things are
important to include. Some of this should be pretty straightforward, but we
can still come up with some good ideas around it.

I spoke briefly with a member of the design team about our docs, pointing
out some of the different ways that we laid out the help (for example, if
you look at the networking help, and then look at the files folders and
search help... the layout is different). We knew that these layouts were
different, but knew that we just didn't have enough time to make things more
consistent for this release. He mentioned that having a consistent layout
breeds familiarity, and that it helps users know where to look for things on
the help pages.

That is a good point, and may even be something that we can consider with
the layout of wiki pages. Being consistent can help people know where to
look for things, regardless of what team pages they are looking at.

The design person that I spoke to (forgot his name?) liked how our docs were
focused on assisting users with specific tasks.  :)

He suggested that we can do some usability sessions, even informal ones, to
see what layout is easier for users. Fortunately, the next session of the
day was a session on running usability sessions. The room was pretty warm,
and my eyes kept closing, but it was well-organized and people took lots of
notes. The notes are up here:
http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/design-o-run-usability-sessions/

I also attended a "design book club" session, and a list of the suggested
books are available here:
http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/design-o-bookclub/  These aren't just
about graphical design, but about user experience-type stuff, too. I placed
on in there about information architecture that had been recommended at a
book club I went to recently.

This note is getting kind of long . . . I guess some of you have hear that
Mark complimented us on good docs for this release.  Woo!  :)  That was
pretty cool, and I'm not going to take away from that, but in the words of
Phil Bull it is the users' praise that matters.  :)  Also, much of that
praise should really be directed to upstream Gnome, too, and I've been
stressing that point with people. We couldn't have done what we did without
the help from certain people of the Gnome team.  :)

I'll send out another shorter note about upcoming sessions in just a little
bit.

Jim
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