Explanatory guide text in Conductor?

Jaromír Coufal jcoufal at redhat.com
Fri Aug 10 07:58:09 UTC 2012


On 9.8.2012 15:46, Matt Wagner wrote:
> 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...
Having wiki page describing everything about concepts in our app, would 
be amazing, but as you mentioned, for us, not for product version. And 
if for product we need special help page in the application and for 
upstream we want wiki page, I am having worries about duplicate 
information and problem of maintenance.
>> 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.
>
You both guys have a point. Imre you are correct that we absolutely 
don't want to distract user from his goal. Matt you are right that if 
user need additional help, he would need to search for it anyway. I 
think that the main question is how often will user need more information?

Just thinking that if I go to create deployable page, my goal is to 
create deployable (not to find information). This tooltip would give me 
all necessary information to fulfil my goal if I get lost. In majority 
cases I don't need any more information.

In less cases if I have no clue what deployable is (tooltip won't help) 
then it is another use case and I know that I need to use help, which 
should be simply reachable. So I would just go to the bottom of the 
page, hit help, hit deployable and I am right there, where I need to be. 
Just one more click (in comparison with direct link from tooltip), no 
distraction from user's goals and we correctly follow user's use-cases.

So I would vote for tooltip without link.

=
  [snip]
=
>> 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.
 From my point of view I definitely would use "turn off", because as 
Justin wrote, for advanced user it would lead to less distraction (less 
information, focus just on the task, clearer page).

-- Jarda

-- 
Jaromír Coufal

Interaction Designer
Red Hat Czech s.r.o.

Mobile: +420 724 595 508
E-mail: jcoufal at redhat.com
IRC: jcoufal at #cloudforms-ui, #aeolus, #brno

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