Recent Doc Team meeting - Poll idea (Do people really use computer-based help?)

[Peter Matulis]

On 05/09/2014 01:51 PM, Penelope Stowe wrote:
> On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:12 AM, Peter Matulis
> <peter.matulis at canonical.com <mailto:peter.matulis at canonical.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Last Wednesday (May 7) we there was a Doc team meeting [1] and an idea
>     surfaced that an attempt be made to determine the general level of
>     readership/usage of the help/doc facility in Ubuntu (Desktop).
>     Including this facility involves participation in a rigid set of
>     development/packaging rules & schedule that may not be worth the
>     trouble.
> 
>     Preliminary poll:
> 
>     << Do people think conducting such a poll is worthwhile? >>
> 
> 
> Who would targeted as responders to said poll? If you only poll current
> Ubuntu users, you're probably going to get a different answer than if
> you poll current users as well as trying to get answers from current
> Windows and MacOS users who could potentially use Ubuntu down the road.
> I've done informal polling of this exact question among people I know
> and there's definitely a difference between the people I know who use
> Ubuntu (who tend to be slightly more technologically savvy) and those
> who use Windows/MacOS, but are part of the stated target of making
> Ubuntu friendly to/usable by everyone. 
> 
> My opinion on whether a poll would be useful does depend on knowing who
> would be the target of such a poll. There are ways to get non-technical
> and non-Ubuntu users to answer a poll on this question. If there's no
> decided target, then I will give a longer explanation of my thoughts.

Thanks for your thoughts Penelope.

I think polling Ubuntu users is good enough since there are former
Windows/Mac users among them.  But you raise an interesting point:  do
we want to know whether a user will even *look* for in-computer help?
My original idea was to determine to what degree Ubuntu users first
*know* about it and, if so, whether they *use* it.

I would rather avoid a hypothetical question such as: "If you were an
Ubuntu user would you look for in-computer help?".

Thoughts?

peter matulis