[ TODO: Come up with a quick "self-help"
blurb which encourages people who get stuck to suggest their own
fixes for incorporation in future products. I'm not sure yet what
this should look like, since it's important to channel that feedback
in ways that'll be easy to integrate into the product. ]
[ RATIONALE: Use a variant of traditional
Open Source mechanisms to capture usability feedback on the help
system every time it fails to answer a user's question. They tried
a bunch of reasonable strategies to get their question answered, but
we failed them. However, this moment is an opportunity to improve
the product, especially if we productively capture those strategies
in the form of specific improvements to the help system. In fact,
just adding the unanswered question to the right spot in the
help system gets us ahead, because it generates a specific TODO that
we might not have known about. ]
[ TODO: Trim the following down. A lot.
It's both wordy and repetitious. ]
Our goal is to make both AbiWord the product and this help system
easy to use. Everything should Just Work, the way you expect it to.
If you're trying to figure out how to do something that AbiWord allows
you to do, then that feature should be described somewhere in this
help system.
If you're having trouble locating the answer you need, be sure to
check the A-Z index, which should have a
pretty comprehensive list of terms and topics used in the product.
Where possible, we've also tried to list those topics under various
common synonyms, so that you don't have to know the exact terminology
used in AbiWord to get the answers you need.
However, just like you, we're not always perfect. If you're still
stuck, that means one of two things:
- either that feature hasn't been implemented yet, or
- we just haven't done a good enough job of explaining it yet.
In both cases, the key word there is "yet".
Fortunately, this is an Open Source product, so even when this
happens, you're not really stuck. Open Source products are constantly
being improved by people like you.
Thus, here are some helpful suggestions for how you can
not only get yourself unstuck, but you can also help make sure that
nobody else ever has the same problem again.
When you opened up this help system, you had a specific question
in mind. There was something you really wanted to figure out how to
do in AbiWord, but you couldn't. You probably even had a pretty good
idea where to look for the answer you needed, but you couldn't find it.
You're stuck.
1. Figure out where the answer should have been
Propose a specific question that should be answered in this help
system. Figure out where you think that answer belongs. While
you're at it, see if you can think up some synonyms that the answer
should be filed under in the index.
The goal is to come up with a specific, well-defined question that
we can stick into the appropriate spot(s) in this help system, so that
when anyone else gets stuck in the same place, they won't have any
trouble finding the answer.
2. Go look for the answer online
Of course, we still need to get you that answer, right?
[TODO: Should this stuff go to abiword-user,
or to abiword-dev? ]
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