Explanatory guide text in Conductor?

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Thu Aug 9 13:46:22 UTC 2012


On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 10:08:30AM +0200, Imre Farkas wrote:
> On 08/09/2012 01:42 AM, Tzu-Mainn Chen wrote:
> >
> >I like this idea, but in my opinion it should be generalized into a glossary/index of help items and topics; and an API that lets us create help links/popups that lead into the glossary.  Popups will help reduce clutter for expert users, and an overall help glossary will give a starting place for new users that might be confused.

I like the idea of a glossary of help terms. We need such a thing. My
dream, actually, would be to get all of these on the wiki, and make each
one a link, so you can see a brief discussion of Deployables on a
glossary page, but also click "Deployable" and read tons of information
about them, their connections, etc.

Though the challenge is what to do for upstream vs. product here -- it
seems like shipping a product that links to our wiki page might not fly.

However...

> I don't like the idea of linking to a different page for
> clarification and distracting the user from the goal he wants to
> achieve with redirects.

+0.75 here. But what I do think might work would be to have a few
sentences of good text on the page, but include a few links
(target=_blank) to much more detailed documentation. That way the
on-page text helps most people, but if you really need to hit the books
on something, the link is right there.

> Jarda proposed in the Consistent forms wiki page to use simple_form
> for all our forms which would also make dead simple to help the user
> with inline labels and hints for every single input fields. With this
> and the summary above the form as it was proposed originally would
> create a really nice UX.

Yes! The combination of the two could be great.

> For advanced users we can provide a switch to turn off all help
> messages globally eg. on his profile page.

It turns out that this is already what Katello does, which is something
we should think about borrowing.

I'm actually all for adding this toggle, but at the same time I wonder
how necessary it is. Users who need the guidance will read them, but
power users are used to skipping over directions anyway. Of course, I
don't at all oppose adding the ability to disable them, I'm just not
sure it's strictly necessary.

-- Matt



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