UDS session for Ubuntu Help (Was: USB installation instructions for beginners)

[Phil Bull]

Hi Mat,

On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 11:03 +0100, Mat Tomaszewski wrote:
> Thanks Phil, this is brilliant work. And this is what I propose.

Thanks. Please let me know what you'd like me to do with it (i.e. if you
need it rushing out for Lucid, or whether it can wait until next
release).

[...]
> During the upcoming UDS there will be, for the first time, a dedicated 
> design and user experience track, driven by our team. It will be a great 
> chance to meet and talk about those exciting challenges. I'd like to 
> propose a working session dedicated to online help and support for 
> Ubuntu, where I'd love to see as many doc team members participating as 
> possible.

I should be able to participate remotely.

> The structure that I think the session should have could be outlined as:
> 
> - Who are our users? When and why do they need help and support? How do 
> they go about solving their problems?
> - What areas of using the desktop are generating most questions?
> - What structure should be applied to the online help to answer those 
> questions most efficiently?
> - What language and tone of voice will be the most effective?
> - What visual language will be the most effective?

A lot of the answers to these questions will be useful upstream too. You
may be aware that GNOME are currently completely rebuilding their help
system with Mallard and Yelp 3.0, so we should try to tie in any of our
work with that effort.

> Charline Poirier, our user research lead (CC'd), has offered her 
> expertise and insight to help with this project and will also 
> participate in the session. Charline will bring her enormous knowledge 
> about users' needs and behaviours but is also very curious about all the 
> findings of the doc team. Please feel free to engage her in your 
> conversations on the mailing list.

At the moment, we're relying solely on our judgement when deciding what
to cover in the docs, which isn't very sensible. Browsing the forums for
common topics can be useful, and I've also started to use a script which
mines the IRC logs for user questions, but it would be great if Charline
could work with us to come up with a more robust methodology.

In particular, I'd be interested in developing a set of user personas
that we could use to inform our writing.

> Phil, would you like to register an appropriate blueprint for UDS? 
> Please email or ping me on irc if you need any help.

I'm hoping that we can have a Doc Team meeting in a week or two so we
can discuss this stuff and get some blueprints registered. It would be
great if you could participate - I'll let you know when the meeting is
arranged for.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull