Hi Allan, Thanks for sharing your ideas with us. I've got a few comments...
On Wed, 22 Jul 2015 18:50:44 +0100 Allan Day <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I recently started looking at a few issues with the documentation from > a design perspective. There were a few initial goals for this: > > 1. Investigate merging the Getting Started documentation into > gnome-user-docs, in order to avoid duplication of material. We've discussed this a few times before and the reasons why these two modules are separate still apply. The most important factor here is the module size. Video files are big and the module / package gets even bigger with every new translation. By having two separate modules, we are giving distributors a choice not to ship additional ~120M of data on their installation media, eg. Also, I don't think there is any duplication of content. For the user, it's really hard to say whether these two documents are technically separated into two modules or not. We use cross-references to ensure the getting-started topics provide links to the user-docs content that goes into more details. And I think that works just fine. Besides that, getting-started is a nice proof-of-concept of some of the killer features of Mallard, like modularity or automatic links. :) > 2. Update the "home screen" designs. I've become dissatisfied with > the latest mockups [1] I did for this, primarily because they don't > give you direct links into content items - this increases the number > of navigation steps, and doesn't draw the user in as it should. Well, this is tricky. You can either provide a list of direct links to very basic topics like we do in getting-started, or you can provide a more comprehensive list with a broader scope, but that means you have to sacrifice something. Mallard is however really good at making the navigation structure easy to use even if your help contains a lot of different topics covering a lot of different areas. > As I did research for these tasks, I started to compile a list of > goals and principles [2]. These are intended to apply to both the > design of Yelp and gnome-user-docs (some goals apply to both). I'm > interested in using them as the basis for the two tasks I mentioned > above (although they could be useful elsewhere). I like the principles, in general. I think they can be applied to the help content provided in all GNOME modules. Cheers, pk _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
