A New Look at How We Write Content for the Desktop User Guide

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 21:15 +0530, Mani A wrote:
> > Agreed that there is a need for computer education for people without
> > experience using computers, but are we sure that Fedora wants to work on
> > that problem?
> Certainly it should. ..We want a bigger user-base.

That's not a very well-defined target for which to shoot, especially
with the limited resources of this team.  We should be concentrating on
the achievable first before we start substantially expanding the focus
of this team.

> > I think I'd rather see some common, upstream documentation that handles
> > that, such as from GNOME and KDE.  Then we can build from that as a
> > base.
> 
> Neither of them can possibly handle distro-specific features in a
> reasonable way.
> More directions will only mean faster adoption and a more stable user-base.

The good part is, they don't have to be distro-specific, at least in
Fedora's case.  This is one of the many nice side-effects of our
sticking with upstream -- their user docs apply directly to our
distribution.

> >> 1. New user does not learn about the name of the Add/Remove Software
> >> program. The first occurrence of "Add/Remove Software program" can be
> >> replaced by "Add/Remove Software program (called 'Pirut')".
> >
> > How do they not learn about it?  Sorry, I'm not getting the initial
> > point.
> 
> I think it is better if we tell the user about the underlying program
> at some point.

I think this is a common misconception of People Who Care like you and
me, who are vastly outnumbered by People Who Don't Care. :-)  The kind
of person who will read this documentation just wants to get the job
done and doesn't really care about strange names that have nothing to do
with the task.

> The main reason is that, users can resolve simple issues with the
> ability to launch a program from the CLI.

Point taken, but I'd call that a bug that we should be spending time
resolving, not a general use case.

> > In Fedora 9 and beyond, it is now PackageKit, and the main way to get it
> > is through the same '''Add/Remove Software''' launcher.  Because that is
> > setup to be a sort of alias or abstraction layer, I wonder if we want to
> > bother naming the application that currently runs underneath it?
> 
>  To call it "Add/Remove Programs" in a GUI is certainly 'being
> user-friendly'. In user guides at least, it is a good idea to speak
> about the underlying program.

See above.  All of the above is MHO.

-- 
Paul W. Frields
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  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
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