Yelp Frontpage / Common Questions (was Re: What are we doing wrong?)

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall at gmail.com> wrote:
>      * The Help and Support launcher is nestled between items people
>        looking for help care nothing about. What is the "and Support"
>        part, anyway?

The "Support" bit is supposed to relate to the ability of users to get
technical support from others through the free or commercial services
offered by the Ubuntu community and Canonical. However I agree that
the words are probably redundant and should be removed. Copying mpt
for any thoughts he has.

Someone else on the thread suggested whether the help link should be
in the Applications menu instead - it would be interesting to hear
people's thoughts on where people are likely to look if they are
looking for onboard help (aside from the internet). My personal
feeling is that the question mark launcher in the panel would be the
first place (I doubt new users would remove such icons), but after
that the Applications menu might be the next one. If there are any
usability studies on this, that would be very interesting to know.

>              * Topic links have a really big font. Seems to clash with
>                the title fonts.

Agreed. I'm going to try and fix that.

>              * How often are the Common Questions updated? "Enabling
>                visual effects" strikes me as odd since they are enabled
>                by default, and if they aren't they probably can't be.
>                On that topic, I noticed that one links to a Visual
>                Effects help page which has no body content; it just
>                links to help pages inside it in two different places.
>                The first one is "what are visual effects?", which has
>                nothing to do with "enabling visual effects." (That
>                said, the "Enabling extra effects" section is nicely
>                done. apt: links are awesome!). The "Keeping your
>                computer updated" section under Common Questions also
>                strikes me as something which handles itself just fine.

I've sent a patch to bug 84853 which deals with the initial issue of
removing the "Enabling visual effects" link from the frontpage.
However I think we should do a re-evaluation of these links for lucid
and am interested in any ideas people have about how we can gather
information about what people's most common problems really are. mpt:
do the usability studies you've done have any information on this?
Others: can we do a sweep of the forum/irc/launchpad answers or a
survey which would collect this data? I wonder if we could get other
teams involved in this as Milo has suggested: e.g. forum moderators
would be best placed to tell us what people are asking on the forum,
and ditto with irc and launchpad answer helpers. Obviously there are
some types of issues that we can't deal with in the help but such a
survey would certainly aid our work.

> Oh, Yelp is also insanely slow and a source of many support questions
> itself when it starts eating every resource it can find and spitting out
> nothing in return. A big distro needs to commit serious technical
> resources to this. There is work going on to port Yelp to use Webkit
> (which will help)

At present, I'm not aware of anyone working on yelp development from
the Ubuntu community, and upstream has only one person working on it.
I agree that yelp's startup and search speed is a big problem that we
face in getting users to read documentation and would simply encourage
anyone with the relevant coding skills who is interested to get in
touch with upstream and with us - it really would be an exceptionally
cool contribution.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF