rough draft of gnome-display-properties

[Vikram Dhillon]

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Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Vikram, Dougie,
> 
> I disagree with both of you!
> 
> While all three of the sections Vikram wrote are really great
> explanations of their respective subjects, they don't help the user in
> any way. Very few users go to the documentation to find explanations of
> a concept. If you were wondering what X11 was, what would you do?
> 
> a) Click System -> Preferences -> Display. Click the Help button. Wait
> ~5-10 seconds for the help browser to come up. Hope that there is a
> topic on X11. Try and find the topic on X11.
> b) Search Google or Wikipedia for "X11". Find an answer instantly.
> 
> If you don't know what X11 is, how would you even know to look in the
> Display preferences help?
> 
> This isn't the sort of help that we need to be providing for our users.
> People interested in learning about how the system works will go and
> read a book or a webpage. The people we are targeting have a question or
> a problem and want to know what they need to answer it or fix it. They
> don't particularly care *why* they need to do the things that we tell
> them, they just want to get it over and done with quickly so they can
> return to whatever they were doing before they ran in to this problem.
> 
> Here's Shaun McCance's take on things [1]. PLEASE read at least the
> first three sections, it explains the situation much better than I just
> did.
> 
> In an effort to help people write the sort of help that users are
> looking for, I've been working on a guide, which you can find a draft of
> here [2]. This is based on discussions I've had with professional
> technical writers, and techniques which I've learned about on technical
> writing websites. I've been using my own guide to help me create some
> documentation for GNOME, which I'm planning to release shortly. In the
> mean time, please read the guide and let me know what you think!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Phil
> 
> [1] - http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/quack/mallard.xml
> [2] -
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Philbull?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=WD-draft-Sept.odt
> 

Thanks for your response Phill, I understand now the fact that users
won't look for explanation in the docs. they want answers, but can you
give me some examples on what the questions could be? I would really
appreciate that

Vikram
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