I just read an interesting blog post about a sixty year old who used a computer for the first time. (http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/user-testing-in-the-wild-joes-first-computer-encounter/) He tried to get started, but couldn't find a way to easily get help. To me, it was fairly obvious that a clearly visible link to a help page on the start page would've been very helpful to him. So I had a look, and sure enough, we have one.
But that link points to https://help.ubuntu.com/. That means that the user needs to first choose his version. He might not know that. However, we do, so we should link directly to the version the user has installed and directly to desktop, so the link should have pointed to https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-help/index.html in 11.04. That page has a small notice at the bottom: «This help applies if you are using the default Unity desktop. Help is also available for the Ubuntu Classic desktop session.» We know what shell the user uses. The user might not. We should have a way to point the user in the right direction at once. In this particular case, the user was trying to use the web. First of all, he needed help using the browser, but then he would need some help understanding the web itself. I think that might have been a nice thing to have. I had a look for that in the help site and I eventually arrived at this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-help/net-browser.html. It explains how to Switch to another browser and how to install Java, Silverlight and Flash. But it does not explain how to browse the web. That seems to me a fairly obvious topic to have. That would've been frustrating to Joe from the test. In other words; there is room for improvement. I realize that it's a bit too late to fix this in 11.04, but if we could make this happen for 11.10 and all future versions, I think it would be a usability improvement. It would also be very nice if that page was translated into more languages and was used by default for the users current language settings. Is anyone working on that? Jo-Erlend Schinstad -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
