On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com> wrote:
What we have done in RHEL is to put yelp on the dash. That does not address the fact that yelp is all about "GNOME Help", not about "Fedora Workstation" - which kinda goes back to our earlier discussion of shipping Fedora specific documentation / release notes on the image, and in what form. If we ship it, we can probably make it show up in yelp.

Oh, that's a much better spot for it. I think having yelp there and shipping the Fedora docs with yelp would go a long way.

I think that helping users to get in touch with Fedora the project (ie find websites, irc channels, forums, etc) can be better achieved by a default page in the browser, or as part of the initial setup (some form of 'system registration / account setup' step).

I think then we need to drop the pending change of dropping start.fpo for the Firefox default 'recently visited' or maybe Rahul's suggestion of an ask.fpo icon. (Or maybe better, an ask.fpo search provider so people can type stuff like, "gvfs crash blah blah blah" and matches from ask.fpo could pop up? (or is this not the way it's meant to be extended?)

Some things I noted while playing with this: - To get to yelp, you just go to the overview and type 'help' - this is explained in one of the 'welcome tour' videos.

Right. This is a lot easier if you know there's something to find. If you don't know that there is a help app (and how would you?) then this is a bit more of a leap of faith. 

It's not something that's used intentionally (nobody wants to have to use help; it's always ancillary to another task that is way more important to a user). Think about how subway cars all have signs about the emergency telecom and fire equipment. Those signs are not like the ads on the subway, but everyone's read them and knows where they are and that the safety equipment exists if they ride the subway with any regularity. (And of course the air mask / seatbelt dance is way too over the top but the card in the seat back pocket on a plane is similar - it's visible, not in your face, if you ever needed it you'll know where it is and have easy access... rather than wonder if any such thing exists when you get in a pickle at which point you might be too panicked / upset to think straight enough to find)

But if there's a help icon in the dash then I think that addresses this - it'll be in a place users will see and they'll know it's there (and they can easily pull it off the dash if they don't want it in the dash.)

- To find out what OS you're running, you can similarly go to the overview and type 'about'.

This falls under the same above. It's not latently visible, you have to intentionally seek it out. But if you don't know it exists, you're less likely to try. And it's similar to help in that nobody wants to have to look for this.

~m