Nautilus "Changing Backgrounds" help is unnecessarily long and doesn't cross-reference desktop background

Thanks for reporting this. The affected documentation is in the GNOME user guide, which is being rewritten over the next 2 release cycles. As such, I'm not sure that it's worth addressing this immediately rather than waiting for the new docs. What's your opinion, are many users struggling with this in particular?

Incidentally, is there any chance that the GNOME and Ubuntu docs teams could get our hands on the user testing data you have?

Unfortunately we can't release raw videos of the tests, because one of the conditions of the subjects' participation is that we don't publish personally identifying information. However, as with other projects, I will report bugs for all the problems test participants encounter with the Ubuntu Help, when they open it while performing other tasks. We can't really test the help directly, because looking for something in the help is not itself an interesting task, so asking people to do it would produce unrealistic results.

This means that the testing data on Ubuntu Help will be rather incidental and piecemeal, so you'll need to extrapolate issues with one topic to other topics. For example, the Nautilus Backgrounds help is needlessly wordy, and insensitive to possible wrong turns the user has made — but those two problems are common to many of Ubuntu's help pages, not just that one. A systematic approach to fixing those problems might use the help page structure I proposed in 2006. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuHelp/PageStructure>

Now, should that wait until the Gnome user guide is rewritten? I don't see any point in waiting, unless there's going to be a license change that prevents text in the existing guide from being copied into new help pages. Otherwise, the new text could be written now, and copied into the new structure when it's ready.

Hi mpt,

For fear of getting further off-topic, I'll reply in a separate email regarding the test videos.

Unfortunately for this bug, there is going to be a license change when the whole guide is rewritten. Certainly, the g-u-g is not fit for purpose at the moment. I doubt it helps very many users, as I've seen with my own user testing. So, is it worth fixing this one issue that happens to have been reported as a bug when there are so many other issues lying unreported? Or should we just wait until the wholesale "fixing" of the docs on the arrival of the new guide?

If you have seen a significant number of users struggling with this particular issue and think that improving this topic will result in a reasonable improvement to their user experiences, then we should fix the bug now. Otherwise, we may as well wait.

I met Paul Cutler yesterday and he explained the license issue to me. I'm a little concerned, though, that the relicensing shouldn't block any improvements to the g-u-g for an indefinite period.

One way of working around this would be to completely rewrite the Nautilus backgrounds section in place, with a source code comment at the start of the section saying that that section is dual-licensed under the FDL and the CC-whatever 3.0 or any later version. That way the whole guide is still licensed under the FDL, but you can copy and paste the text to the new help when its structure is ready.

What I was trying to explain in my previous comment was that because we can't test the help both directly and realistically, we will rarely, if ever, "see[] a significant number of users struggling with [a] particular issue" in the help. We'll occasionally see one person dive into a particular area of the help, and have a problem, and we'll have to make our best guess as to whether other people would have the same problem.

That would be a good solution to the licensing issue I think. If we rewrite the whole section, I'd like to plan it properly first and collect some user testing data. I'll try to recruit someone to work on it upstream. The only problems I see with that is that we'd have to convert it from DocBook to Mallard in a release cycle or two, and it might look out of place for a while.

I understand that you won't see many people looking at the help and experiencing problems, although data on that would be useful if you had it. Rather, I was referring to problems that users experience in general. If lots of them are having the same problem and it's nothing that's going to be fixed in the UI any time soon, then we should provide documentation to help people with the problem.