Well, the feedback I had from my users was highly critical when we first switched to OOo 1.1.x, and understandably so. Things have been much improved IMHO with version 2.x, but only last week, one of my members of staff said they typed in a word (I don't remember which one now) in the search index and nothing came out of it. When I showed them where to find the things they were looking for, they turned to me and said, "how many people do you know like me who would've typed in the keywords you just entered ?" All of this being with respect to the French version of course. To be honest, I had to concede defeat on this point. I was
Yes, 1.1.x help had its problems. For some time now, our plan was to move to concise instructional application help and leave background information and concepts to guides outside the help. There are some major challenges, though (probably truisms for professional help writers): Who do we write for? How detailed should the instructions be? We have an *extremely* diverse audience, how can we serve all? *Should* we serve all? How do we decide that? Learn the user's language Finding the "right" index terms, i.e. the terms the user looks for which may as well be technically "wrong" terms, is an art mastered by few. And without feedback it's hard to learn these terms. We have one writer, Martina, working on indexing a great deal of her time and she did an excellent job already. But it's a truly sysiphean task. We once thought about implementing some sort of automatic feedback mechanism that collects the search terms entered by a user and reports it back so we see what the users look for but there are data privacy issues connnected to that (that I understand, btw). If you have any ideas how we can get this type of feedback, we'd be happy to learn. Localization This is a tough one. Of course, index entries are *very* specific to the language (and even the cultural environment). So simply translating the index entries that we specify for English will not be enough. Yet this is what is done mostly. The help format deliberately allows localizers to add and remove index entries for their language. They are completely free in assigning their own set of index entries for their language. But this would require an indexer's job. So the usefulness of the index depends on the localization quality (much more than the content does). Search engine This is an engineering issue. There is nothing more to say to the (full text) search engine than: it sucks. I also have been bugging development for years now to change that and it looks like it's on their radar again and we will have a working search engine in OOo3.
Yes, the positive feedback rarely gets mentioned :-) Maybe one way around this would be to divide the help up into basic and advanced tasks. Of course, we would still be faced with the problem of deciding what goes where :-( , but we could in that case maybe
IMO it's a bad thing to let the user who seeks help categorize the type or level of help (s)he is seeking. I am trying to convince engineering to switch from Writer to a state-of-the-art rendering engine (like gecko) as help rendering engine so we could use some neat DHTML/CSS magic to complement basic instructions with more detailed instructions when the users demands it. Frank --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
