What's this help

[Philip Rodrigues]

Hi,

Just some little additions to what Ellen mentioned:

One of the most noticeable problems for docs (which I'm involved with) and,
I think, whatsthis, is having users actually *use* them. I think the
tooltip->whatsthis->docs progression that Ellen outlined is a great way to
lead users to the documentation where it's relevant, and also to get
context-sensitivity in the docs. Also, I think Ellen told me at akademy
that usability tests show that users will often use tooltips, so we have an
entry point into the "help system" there, and we should make full use of
it.

You can find the source code for Richard's whatsthis tool at
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~chri1802/stuff/qt-hack.tar.gz in case you want to
try it out. It's of course, just a proof-of-concept, so don't expect it to
be wonderful, but it shows the idea. It also shows that this sort of thing
can be done (fairly) easily in the code, so go crazy with your ideas, and
the coders can probably come up with something to match them :-).

(Mini intro: I'm part of the docs team, and got interested in this topic
during discussions at akademy. I should admit that I don't really know much
about usability, and I can't write code, so I can't help directly with
this, but I see a lot of potential in the tooltips/whatsthis system, and
I'd like to help this idea take off. To that end, consider me your
testing/co-ordination/whatever monkey. I will of course be able to help
with the bit of the system that ties directly in with the docs :-)

Regards,
Philip
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org