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

[Karl Auer]

On Sat, 2014-05-10 at 09:27 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> Just a note that google is not nearly as useful for less experienced
> users as good Help can be.

There are two quite different ckasses of in-bult help. The first is help
for what you might call known things - "how do I use this thing to do
such-and-such". In-built help is often quite useful for this -
LibreOffice's GUI help system for example, or pretty much any man page.
This sort of help is fairly easy to incrementally improve, by adding
sections, rewording, adding more explanation, improving the indexing and
so on.

The second kind of help, though, is for unknown things - help when
things go wrong or do not behave as expected. In-built help for these
situations is far less effective. Certainly Windows users have been
trained for decades not to bother with Microsoft's insultingly useless
in-built troubleshooting.

The experience of many decades of computing has shown that the very best
means of providing the second sort of help is to establish a user
community.

>   They do not have the experience to filter the google results to find the useful stuff.

A community provides help with that meta-problem too. "Try searching
for...", "the keyword you are looking for is..." and so on.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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