Excellent idea Allison. A good time to think about this again would be
after the refinements to the site which Jonathan is planning (and to
which I hope to contribute).
Paul
Allison Bloodworth wrote:
Nice suggestions Paul! I second your thoughts on doing some user
testing. I'm hoping to do something similar for the Open Source Design
Pattern Library, and I think looking at how Fluid release users
implement components, solve design problems, and use our user manual
would give us some great insights on how to design all our reference
materials. Perhaps that is something we can plan to do sometime after
the Sakai Conference in Paris? Or if anyone plans to actually work on
component implementation *in* Paris, we could even connect with them
there.
Allison
On Jun 2, 2008, at 4:37 PM, Paul Zablosky wrote:
This whole exercise of creating a virtual user manual has raised all
sorts of interesting questions. I'm delighted to see th d as the ToC
evolves. Is it a release manual (our original objective), or a manual
for people using any of the resources of the Fluid project (something
it may be morphing into)?
I'm inclined to let it develop a bit, but keep discussion going on
important issues, such as how we keep release-specific content
distinguished from release-independent stuff -- the issue Anastasia
addressed. We'll need a few guidelines to keep things under
control. I offer the following for discussion:
1. Content that is associated with the Fluid software releases
should be readily identifiable and easily found by the release
consumers. Right now we have it as the first sections of the
ToC. We should keep it this way until we come up with a more
logical setup.
2. Annotations should give the user an idea of what's on the page
without clicking on it. We should always keep that in mind when
composing or editing them.
3. Section annotations should the material in the section is going
to be generally of interest to them.
4. The ToC should not have any child pages. Pages with
manual-only content should be attached to a central "Manual"
parent page, if they have no other logical home.
5. The ToC has now grown to about 2 1/2 scrollable screens in
size. At some point it may become unwieldy. I have been
toying with the idea of have cloakable sections but I'm not
sure this is a good idea. It would mean the user having to
click rather than scroll.
What this whole scheme needs is some user testing. Is it doing its
job of making the Fluid reference material more accessible to
consumers of the Fluid deliverables? How can we find out? We may not
be ready for that yet -- we may want to do a few more rounds of
refinement first -- but it's something to keep in mind.
Paul
Colin Clark wrote:
I think the main impetus for adding this section was that we
wanted to share out the results of the Content Management
Research as a way of reporting on the state of UX in the Fluid
communities (which I believe is one of the Fluid deliverables).
After adding this, I realized that the results of the UX
Walkthroughs are also something that we should probably share.
I'm not entirely sure the OSDPL working group belongs there, but
I added it at the last moment to publicize that effort and maybe
it should be deleted. I guess the question is, who is the
audience of the manual and would they find this information
helpful (or conversely does the manual become overwhelming for
most of our audience when it is included)?
The audience question--will they find this particular information
helpful or overwhelming?--is exactly the right question, and one
which I'm un br>
The nice thing about not freezing our documentation in PDF format is
that we can take some time to work out this question and change the
table of contents whenever we decide. :)
Colin
---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org
Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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