Bullseye! Katarina is absolutely on target. Traditional yast help consists of texts like "Press the Apply button to perform the changes." No kidding, such UI descriptions are absolutely unnecessary.
A big reason for why in the GTK plugin I chose to get rid of the side help-bar (remember that?) and "hide" the help text into its own button (which now all the UIs do) was the unhelpfulness of the help texts. A help button that pops up the appropriate manual section however, detailing the use cases and explaining some technical details about the FTP server that opensuse ships with, and others is absolutely welcome. Tooltips might be useful here and there too (like in the users tool to say that only alphanumeric characters may be used for the user name), but I would try not to over-do those and implement it another way when possible (they're annoying because you feel you must press them in order to avoid any mis-step). Cheers, Ricardo Ter, 2010-02-23 às 15:05 +0100, Katarina Machalkova escreveu: > > Concerning help: > > Currently there is no explicit "help" concept in webYaST. > > One reason is that usability studies > > Which usability studies? [citation needed] > > > showed that users often find "Help" quite unhelpful > > But that's not the fault of the users! Why should the users be punished for > the fact that hackers are unable to write proper help by being given no help > at all? > > > and the other reason is that it is our aim to > > create an UI which is so simple and self-explanatory that "Help" > > becomes superflous. > > There is nothing wrong with the effort to create UI that is simple and self- > explanatory. But - there are concepts you can't do away with and yet you > can't > make them self-explanatory no matter how hard you try. > > Taking the recent 'wontfix-ed' example - what if I don't know what a DNS > server is? Do I have to open a separate tab in browser and google for it? > Shouldn't the application/website I'm using provide me with all the > information I need instead? > > > If you want to give the user detailled information about a setting use > > either prefilled input fields or a short explanatory text below the > > settings label. > > "detailed information" and "short explanatory text" contradict each other. > You either have detailed info and your text is no longer short, or the text > is > short and the info is not detailed anymore. > > LiveJournal (a popular blogging site) uses '?' icons adjacent to the form > fields which are not self-explanatory. Our very own SLMS web frontend does > the > same (LJ icons link to FAQ which then open in separate window, SLMS shows the > explanation in icon tooltip). > > Not only those two concepts show the help when the user wants to be helped, > but it looks somehow pretty as well. > > But obviously, my concept of "pretty", "cool" and "helpful" is entirely > different from those of the rest of the (normal) world > > sB. -- Cheers, Ricardo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
