Does Ubuntu Care About It's Documentation?

[Andreas Lloyd]

On 3/14/06, Jonathan Jesse <jjesse at iserv.net> wrote:
> Let's look at how MS does their website.  Thier knowledge base, which I would
> argue is probablly the best knowledge base out ther to look for information
> is linked off a "support" page where you need to determine if the support
> needed is "self support" or "assisted support" and the link to the knoweldge
> base is small to find (http://support.microsoft.com)
>
> When I look for support from problems with my Dell laptop to problems with an
> HP Printer I always look for either www.companyname.com/support or
> support.companyname.com if that fails I dig around on the website which I
> hate to do.  By having www.ubuntu.com/support I can see the documenation on
> the third link, as well as having the tab along top.  So I would totally
> disagree with your blog post.

That being said, I think it would still be relevant to present the
support information in a nicer way. I made a rough sketch of how the
Support page could be a while back on the wiki:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Website/SupportSection

I think that might well be a pleasant compromise. I do think that it
would be difficult to present actual documentation at less than the
third link from the front page of the web site without making the look
and feel of it cluttered and difficult to navigate.

It is a central point that most users have bad experiences of the
Desktop help from Windows, therefore it is essential that the system
refers to the documentation as early and as clearly as possible when
it encounters a known problem (such as the restricted codecs).

I suppose that this was Robert's original point: that the system
itself needs to be better at helping the user. If the system presents
the help directly to the user at start-up and proves worthwhile and
plentiful - there'll be less need to look at website.

Andreas