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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Templates and Support
From:       Jim Conner <jconner83 () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2001-08-06 20:57:50
[Download RAW message or body]

I've done about 3 years of Tech Support for 2 different ISPs.  Granted, most 
of this was for Win3.x, Win9x, WinNT4 and Mac.  Yes, you can put themes and 
change even the name of 'My Computer' so that it is completely different than 
a standard Win9x install.  I've run into this on multiple occasions.  Usually 
when this is the case, I tell the user to open 'My Computer' and they reply 
that it's called 'Foo'.  So, the rest of the conversation is based on 'Foo' 
instead of 'My Computer'.  This has never caused me any grief.  In KDE, most 
of the tech calls would be either from the command line or tell the user to 
click on KMenu and branch out to whatever the tech wants.  The default icons 
for KDE2.x on the desktop are the Trash and Home icons.  Some distros put 
other icons on there as well.  Some distros even rearrange the KMenu to suit 
their viewpoint.  This will not stop the user that wants to customize their 
Kicker panel, desktop or Kmenu to something totally different from the 
default that KDE provides.  At that point, if you tell the user to bring up 
the konqueror file manager by clicking on KMenu->Home Directory, they will 
tell you they put it in KMenu->Foo->Konqui File Manager and you adjust to 
that.  The same if they happened to move the Control Center and change the 
label to something different.  I haven't found a user yet that customized 
his/her desktop that didn't know what the original name was before they 
changed it.  I did have one person that accidentally change 'My Computer' to 
a period and wanted to know how to change it back.  Having the user create 
and send you a config file of some type or even a screenshot would take time 
and bandwidth that Call Centers can't afford.  Having good techs that can 
adjust to user customizations is what you need.  Also, unless this can be 
made to work across distros, from /opt/kde2/* to /usr/????/kde2/* and various 
other configurations, it would probably cause more grief that it's worth.  
What we need to work on is a good looking/usable desktop, kicker, and Kmenu 
that is the default install.  Granted, the user and distro will probably 
change it to suit their needs.

Jim

On Monday August 06, 2001  3:31 pm, Eric E wrote:
> I keep thinking that what you really want for support
> is to be able to SEE what the user sees on her
> desktop.
>
> It seems to me a simple way to do this would be to
> have a little "Desktop Browser" that recreates user's
> desktop based on the settings in .kde .  Then we could
> give the user a simple way to zip, sign, and send
> (secured, or course) the appropriate .rc files to the
> person doing support, then you could have a picture of
> what was on their screen.
>
> Potential drawbacks :
>  - changes to .rc files could break compatibility with
> this "Desktop Browser"
>  - security risks?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> This brings up the larger question of a schema for
> .kde, so that settings could be indexed, searched and
> updated.  Is this off topic?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Eric

-- 
 
  2:42pm  up 13 days, 15:16,  3 users,  load average: 0.33, 0.14, 0.15
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Running Caldera eD2.4 - Linux - because life is too short for reboots...

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