Jason Rodrigues wrote: > On Friday 16 March 2007 05:59, Ed W wrote: > >> Hi >> >> >>> 2) "tooltip" description for specific widgets on the screens. >>> >>> Any other thoughts? >>> > > Perhaps nodes can be tagged with special classes? > > And an option, either inline on the page, or on the menu frame, can turn on > the tooltips (like, Balloons in MacOS <= 9.0) > > All it would do is active some javascript that inspects the node under the > pointer, runs var help_topic_ids = /(hlp_\w+?)/.exec(node.className), > (className so we can reserve id= for scripting purposes) > And then via AJAX, frames or whatever, queries a locale-specific short help > string, and optionally offers a link to a full longer description (in the > manual, perhaps?) > > Tooltips are a great place to start, possibly something along the lines of a little help icon with a mouseover.
But they only go so far. The real questions users have are about how to use software to meet their needs. The big jump will be when we can move from feature-based help to task-oriented help. I think that starts with a couple key menu links: "Getting Started", containing an overview of the organization of the system, with headers along the lines of "The sales process", "Purchasing", "Reconciling your accounts", etc., and the already existing "Help" link with some solid task-oriented help that provides more detail. The next step might be to add a help pane to the existing screens. When you're actually in a particular screen, possibly have a help icon that opens a task-based help topic in another frame (since we're already using frames). Keep it visible on the window so that people can go to other screens without losing the help contents, trace transactions from Quotations to Sales Orders to Customer Invoice to Cash Receipt. And, of course, a close button to make that frame go away again. I have customers who would probably assist in creating some of the help. For this level of help, I'd like to see graphics embedded in the text--the one drawback to using plain text. I guess I'd prefer to see something that at least converts to HTML, either Docbook, Wiki text, straight HTML, OpenDocument, something... Cheers, -- John Locke "Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems" published by Charles River Media, June 2004 http://www.freelock.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
