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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Tip of the day
From:       Fred Schaettgen <Sch () ttgen ! net>
Date:       2005-09-07 15:27:27
Message-ID: 200509071727.28285.Sch () ttgen ! net
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On Wednesday, 7. September 2005 11:56, Ferdinand Gassauer wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 7. September 2005 10:06 schrieb Benjamin Meyer:
> > I am curious if anyone knows of a study showing if the tip of the day
> > dialog box is of any real value.  Logically when someone starts an
> > application they want to do some task, not learn more about it.  Only
> > later when they are having trouble they launch help and browse around,
> > they don't want to have to restart the application just to view the tips.
> >  Right?
> >
> > I know that even myself have on occasion read through them, but I have
> > also read through some of the help docs.  Maybe that would be a better
> > place to put the information.
> >
> > The reason I bring this up now is that we make changes like this for
> > KDE4.
> >
> > -Benjamin Meyer
>
> IMHO in the Help menu it should say "useful tips", a popup of a (different)
> message every day is not usefull for users. many even dare to uncheck the
> "show Tips at startup", but they do not read and propable need it.

In that case this "useful tips" menu item could simply link to the appropriate 
section in the documentation. This would also keep the different types of 
documention together.

What I would like to have is a changelog popup that is shown when I start the 
program after upgrading to a new version. 
If you use a program for the first time, then chances are good that you 
explore it to find out what it can do. But at some point you stop exploring 
it and just use what you need. Now when you upgrade the application, the 
program will look the same as before in most cases and unless new features 
appear directly under the mouse cursor, chances are low that you discover it.
So it happens quite often that you keep missing a feature which was actually 
implemented in the meantime because you didn't check the whole application 
each time up upgraded it. 
Very often you don't even notice what packages were updated, you just do 
apt-get upgrade or what else just to be up to date.

Do you know what new features kate got with 3.4 or 3.5 for instance? Or 
kopete?

So when you upgrade from version 1.2 to 4.0 for instance, then a dialog should 
pop up that displays all relevant changes that happend in the meantime.
It should be compact enough to give a quick overview of the changes, not a 
detailed changelog, so we can present everthing in a single list once - maybe 
as a list of expandable headlines.

The "tips" window should tell the user things he/she didn't know already, 
otherwise it is not considered helpful. New features are not everything a 
user might not know about, but at least chances are better that the user is 
really interested in it.


Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
Sch@ttgen.net
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