On 9.8.2012 15:46, Matt Wagner wrote:
On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 10:08:30AM +0200, Imre Farkas wrote:
On 08/09/2012 01:42 AM, Tzu-Mainn Chen wrote:
I like this idea, but in my opinion it should be generalized into a
glossary/index of help items and topics; and an API that lets us create help
links/popups that lead into the glossary. Popups will help reduce clutter for
expert users, and an overall help glossary will give a starting place for new
users that might be confused.
I like the idea of a glossary of help terms. We need such a thing. My
dream, actually, would be to get all of these on the wiki, and make each
one a link, so you can see a brief discussion of Deployables on a
glossary page, but also click "Deployable" and read tons of information
about them, their connections, etc.
Though the challenge is what to do for upstream vs. product here -- it
seems like shipping a product that links to our wiki page might not fly.
However...
Having wiki page describing everything about concepts in our app, would
be amazing, but as you mentioned, for us, not for product version. And
if for product we need special help page in the application and for
upstream we want wiki page, I am having worries about duplicate
information and problem of maintenance.
I don't like the idea of linking to a different page for
clarification and distracting the user from the goal he wants to
achieve with redirects.
+0.75 here. But what I do think might work would be to have a few
sentences of good text on the page, but include a few links
(target=_blank) to much more detailed documentation. That way the
on-page text helps most people, but if you really need to hit the books
on something, the link is right there.
You both guys have a point. Imre you are correct that we absolutely
don't want to distract user from his goal. Matt you are right that if
user need additional help, he would need to search for it anyway. I
think that the main question is how often will user need more information?
Just thinking that if I go to create deployable page, my goal is to
create deployable (not to find information). This tooltip would give me
all necessary information to fulfil my goal if I get lost. In majority
cases I don't need any more information.
In less cases if I have no clue what deployable is (tooltip won't help)
then it is another use case and I know that I need to use help, which
should be simply reachable. So I would just go to the bottom of the
page, hit help, hit deployable and I am right there, where I need to be.
Just one more click (in comparison with direct link from tooltip), no
distraction from user's goals and we correctly follow user's use-cases.
So I would vote for tooltip without link.
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[snip]
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For advanced users we can provide a switch to turn off all help
messages globally eg. on his profile page.
It turns out that this is already what Katello does, which is something
we should think about borrowing.
I'm actually all for adding this toggle, but at the same time I wonder
how necessary it is. Users who need the guidance will read them, but
power users are used to skipping over directions anyway. Of course, I
don't at all oppose adding the ability to disable them, I'm just not
sure it's strictly necessary.
From my point of view I definitely would use "turn off", because as
Justin wrote, for advanced user it would lead to less distraction (less
information, focus just on the task, clearer page).
-- Jarda
--
Jaromír Coufal
Interaction Designer
Red Hat Czech s.r.o.
Mobile: +420 724 595 508
E-mail: [email protected]
IRC: jcoufal at #cloudforms-ui, #aeolus, #brno
