Re: Flicking through docs (was: Re: PDFs for user-guide, accessibility-guide and system-admin-guide)

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 07:24 +0000, Joachim Noreiko
> wrote:
> > --- Matthew East <mdke ubuntu com> wrote:
> > > Perhaps a "View Document on Single Page" option.
> > > There is no need to
> > > move away from rendering html to do this, of
> course.
> > 
> > Would we want an all-or-nothing toggle that does
> > regular yelp or continuous page yelp, or should we
> > allow the user to choose at what level to apply
> > breaks?
> 
> I think it's very easy to get lost in a very long
> scrolled page.  Books provide a lot of visual hints
> that people work with almost subconsciously.  The
> screen provides considerably fewer cues for linear
> scanning.
> 
> Back to the question.  Yelp is designed, first and
> foremost, to be an online help system for help with
> user tasks.  The primary use case is finding some
> particular piece of information quickly, and then
> moving on with your life.  Peripheral reading is
> secondary.

Secondary, but also useful.
Users may open a manual just to have a nose around:
"ok, so I've launched this gedit application. What can
it do for me? Let's browse through the manual..."

> That means that we want to encapsulate units of
> information as best as possible.  A page should
> always contain succinct information on one topic.
> Judicious use of cross links can provide extensive
> peripheral information, far more than hierarchies
> can, for those who want it.

Yes, hierarchies can quickly get unwieldy.
I only have to look at the different bits about
locking the screen and the screensaver in the UG to
see that: there are three sections, scattered all
over, and I see no way to bring them together.

> As we move towards more topic-centric help, we'll
> have a much less clear linear path through the
> help.  Imagine printing Wikipedia.  How do you
> serialize that sort of information?
>
> The short answer, I suppose, is that the places
> I want to take Yelp do not lend themselves to
> being serialized.  Of course, that's also going
> to present problems for the "Print This Document"
> action.

We will still need a User Guide that walks beginners
through the basic concepts of mouse, keyboard,
windows, and the rest of the GUI.
An application such as gedit will still have a manual
contents page.

Of course there won't actually BE a user guide, or a
gedit manual. These will just be slices that cut
through the Whole General Sort Of Mish-Mash: a list of
selected topics arranged in a reasonable order.

So, given that, we could display it in one continous
scroll.
Though I think your point about the absence visual
hints is a good one.

(Hmmm... I love the smell of Mallard in the morning ;)




		
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