Help

Contents

Help

Help and getting started information.

Goals

Be a fantastic advert for the product: look great, be easy to use, show people the best of GNOME
Be a guide book, not an encyclopaedia
Prioritise the most useful and interesting material
Clear, simple navigation structure
Help users to get the most out of GNOME - advertise cool features that they might not be aware of
Provide effective search
Integrate with downstream products:
- Don't expose the word "GNOME", or refer to the system/product in a way that will interfere the identity of downstream products.
- Integrate downstream support services and sites.

Non-goals

An overview of all help documentation on the system.

Relevant Art

OS X

Chrome OS

Discussion

What is the relationship between operating system and application help? This is particularly tricky for those applications that are tightly integrated with the rest of the OS, such as Software and Settings.

-- AllanDay

It's interesting to think in terms of a learning curve. The goal is to help users become happy and productive with GNOME. In the beginning, this might require learning basics. Later on, you might want to learn tips and tricks or more advanced topics.

The initial page could show that there are more advanced topics.
When Help is used for the first time (or when the user closes it), you could show a hint, suggesting that they could come back later.
Show which pages have been read? Or perhaps allow them to be manually checked off?
Show bookmarks more prominently, particularly on the home page.

-- AllanDay

Downstream distributors and ISVs often distribute documents (Mallard & DocBook XML documents, HTML and PDF files) and install them into a common system-wide documentation directory (normally /usr/share/doc/). what the Fedora Release Notes RPM looks like