Natan Yellin wrote: > On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Dan Winship <d...@gnome.org > <mailto:d...@gnome.org>> wrote: > Maybe there are as few people reading the > docs as there are writing them. In a corporate setting, people will call > their help desk when they have problems, and in a home setting, they'll > either ask a friend/family member, or ask on a forum. (If people RTFMed > first, we wouldn't need an acronym for it.) > > This is a moot point unless it can be proven.
As I understand it, this is pretty much universally assumed in the usability community. Eg, here's Joel Spolsky: When you design user interfaces, it's a good idea to keep two principles in mind: 1. Users don't have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn't read it. 2. In fact, users can't read anything, and if they could, they wouldn't want to. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html) and Jacob Nielsen: The fundamental truth about documentation is that most users simply *do not* read manuals. (http://books.google.com/books?id=o1IqPH0a2fYC&pg=PA149) Sure, they both go on to discuss the limited situations in which users will actually look at docs, but in both cases, it suggests that what you want is a bunch of independent answers to questions of the form "How do I do X?", not a single document arranged for linear reading. -- Dan PS - and I want to second what Luis said: > [Let me preface this by saying that I respect the work the doc team > has done, but given that their goals were to help users, I think we > can best respect their work by asking the real and hard question of > whether or not the docs, as they currently stand, are helping users, > and not just glibly dismissing that question out of hand.] _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list