HelpfulHelp

Differences between revisions 1 and 4 (spanning 3 versions)

Status

"Help" in GNOME is rarely helpful at present. The button/menu item usually acts as a link to the manual, which is rarely helpful.

Consider what you would do if a user said "help!". Would you start listing the commands? No. You would could do any of several things:

Give a brief summary of what the programme is about and how to do the task they seem to be trying to do at the moment.
Take them through some trouble-shooting questions if they seem to be having trouble.
Link in to the support/bug reporting system.

Providing help when people get stuck is part of an overall humane experience.

See for example [http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2005/04/11/407484.aspx this post about web search vs online help in MS Office].

When an error message is shown, there is a link to help with troubleshooting information and a place to submit a support request/bug.

HelpfulHelp (last edited 2008-08-06 16:16:34 by localhost)

-  ⇤ ← Revision 1 as of 2005-04-27 09:55:24 → 
  Size: 1339
  Editor: intern146
  Comment: create this from a conversation with mpt
+   ← Revision 4 as of 2005-05-26 16:12:46 → ⇥
  Size: 1681
  Editor: 252
  Comment: link to similar idea for Office
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- * Status: BrainDump, UduBof, DistroSpecification, NewSpec
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+Providing help when people get stuck is part of an overall humane experience.  

See for example [http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2005/04/11/407484.aspx this post about web search vs online help in MS Office].
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+ * When an error message is shown, there is a link to help with troubleshooting information and a place to submit a support request/bug.