On Sun, 4 Oct 2009, Ulf Lamping wrote: > JOSM translation shows that users are taking care if the hurdle for a > first start isn't too high. Me feeling is that the help system
The number of translators is so low, that I fear that does not qualify as real good example of user help. Also only about 6 languages are usually near 100%, the others are much below. > 1. We need a josm-users mailing list. osm.talk (or local lists) are too > polluted, josm-dev is not the right place for non dev questions (and > "dev" probably prevents users from asking here). We currently don't have > a place for a "JOSM user community" that could handle lot's of issues > already at this place. Maybe we even need josm-users-de as there are > lot's of german only JOSM users? I don't think there would be enough traffic for JOSM only users lists. The normal talk list are probably much better for this purpose. > 2. Add meaningful tooltips for all GUI elements. This is by far the > easiest and fastest way (beside a good GUI design) for people to learn a > new GUI (at least that's true for me). While a lot of places already > have useful tooltips, especially new GUI parts often missing this - > where it would be most helpful. Here specific suggestions are required: What elements miss describing texts and what should the texts tell. This falls in the same group like "Why do I need to click this and that, clicking this would be easier". The answer usually is: "Because nobody ever thought about it that way". This is like the improvements in history dialog. One trac ticket with a simple suggestion caused Karl to make the history dialog much more understandable. It's not always that easy, but sometimes such hints can do miracles. For me users problems in mailinglists are no suggestion to document the way the software works, but they are a suggestion, that the software needs improvement. There are long-standing problems which need lots of work (like the still missing specific relation handlings) and others which only need finetuning. > 4. Add the basic help steps yourself as a start. It's a lot easier for > both sides (devs and users) to have a minimal help page to start to work > from. If questions arise and the dev tells the user: "Please have a look > at URL xy. It's not perfect, it's a wiki, please improve it" - that's a > lot more helpful than just: "do it yourself". At least my experience shows this is not true. Since I'm developing JOSM I tried multiple times. None of the stubs I wrote ever got expanded. Either there is someone caring for documentation or there is not. This is not the task of the developers, they are to valuable to continue development. For me programming is like walking - very easy. I learned that this is different for most other people and that only few people are really able to do good programming. I wont allow that these few people are scared away because they are forced to document their work more than necessary. Documentation is an independent task (not only for OpenSource, but also in larger companies). If nobody wants to document JOSM, then we have no documentation. As long as we try to improve the UI to be better understandable whenever possible I have no problem with this. > I guess just a little bit development could boost the user participation. No. All my experience shows that this is untrue. People either help or they don't help. Ciao -- http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available) _______________________________________________ josm-dev mailing list josm-dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
