LinkingDesktopToOnlineHelp

Revision 5 as of 2006-01-01 05:27:32

Clear message

Summary

There is a great deal of help available online. We need an ability to link to that information from the desktop.

Rationale

People need help but sometimes the help shipped with the system does not completely answer someone's questions. Suitable help is often available on the wiki, or elsewhere online. This spec outlines an approach to making the online help readily available to users reading local help.

Use cases

  • Jenny tries to install her scanner and follows the guide that is shipped. She finds that does not work. She knows about the wiki and finds there is a guide for her scanner there. She wants to be able to go from the shipped help to that guide.
  • Jim is having problems with his wireless card. He is a new computer user and doesn't know where else to look when the shipped help cannot answer his question. He gets stuck and decides to go back to Windows.
  • Sally goes to the help menu on Firefox and goes to "Get Help online". She doesn't see any docs on that page that can help her.

Scope

There are two cases here: - The launchpad-integration work - Links within the shipped documentation

Design

People should not have to decide between two or more places to look for help when they have no way of knowing which of them, if any, will contain the answer they want. Therefore each help resource should provide access to the resource that's next most likely to be useful:

  • the bottom of each Yelp page should link to a text search for that topic on [http://help.ubuntu.com/ help.ubuntu.com]

  • the bottom of each help.ubuntu.com page should link to a page describing the forums and IRC channels.

The exception to this is when people much prefer a different mode of interaction; for example they don't like reading off a computer screen and want to talk to someone on the phone instead.

Implementation

  • Improving the Launchpad-integration work
    • Make certain that the Ubuntu-doc team in LP has the ability to edit any of the LP landing pages.
    • Collect relevant links for each LP page
  • Linking the existing docs to the wiki
    • Collect a list of good wiki pages for linking
    • Figure out where that above list gets linked in the shipped docs

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

  • When you use Apple's Help Viewer while online, Help Viewer checks apple.com for updated docs. It would be nice if yelp could do this one day.

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec