SilverStipe UserHelp card sort discussion

[Cam Findlay]

Starting a clean thread to discuss the userhelp site IA.

Attached is some card sorted from 4 different teams given cards from both userhelp.sivlerstripe.org and silverstripehelp.net and asked to try to bring the two sites nav/IA together.

Also included is the original IA of both source sites.

Please comment of which team sorted you think best represent the content to the CMS user/admin or any other improvements you think could be made so we can derive a final IA to move forward with.

Cheers,

Cam Findlay.

[Stevie Mayhew]

Team Four seems to be the most logical groupings to me, and follows a path which you could go from start -> finish as well as being easy to find within the IA

[James Cocker]

I actually prefer Team 3. I think the items in Basic Overview make the most sense, and I like how tasks are cleanly split into separate Pages and Content sections. 

In Team 4, I feel there are too many sections, and it's not immediately obvious where to go to find certain tasks. E.g. the sections Working with Page Content and Managing Pages seem to have no obvious differents in their items, both have tasks relating to pages. And I prefer images to be under Content, as I don't feel a Media & Assets section is immediately for to typical CMS users.

James

[Matt Clegg]

I agree with James' comments on team 3.

And having advanced modules listed as advanced features makes sense too.

Matt

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[Cam Findlay]

If team 3 & 4 IA were brought together somehow, what do you think that would look like? 

Feel free to draft that document and put forward as an iteration on this :)

[feejin]

When I show people round the CMS, Team Three is pretty much the order I'd do it. It makes the most sense to me - show people the general structure of pages (which then mostly applies throughout), before zoning in on specifics such as the rich text editor, media etc.

I'd include previewing under "Pages" myself, from a training point of view it makes sense to open a page, work from the top to the bottom, with a "we'll come back to this bit later" for the Content field (and other rich text areas). Therefore preview / save is the last item under "Pages", before going back up the page to address Creating and Editing Content.

Colin

[Cam Findlay]

Working on a hackday project today to look at reworking the IA of userhelp. I'm looking to go with something similar to card sort 3 in the pdf attached earlier in this thread (with some potential thing from sort 4).

Will update as I progress.

On Monday, 2 March 2015 12:01:29 UTC+13, Cam Findlay wrote:

[Paul Clarke]

Sort: 1,2,3: Not a fan of the way modules have there own section - from previous tests I have observed people don't know what is a module and what is core. If they need to have their own section then it might be better labeled as "Advanced features".
Sort 4: Not sure how forms got included within Media and assets.

Did a bit of a sort (was easier than making heaps of comments) and I've changed some of the labels.

Introduction
    Interface overview
    Contains links to:
        Demo
        Web browser differences
        Web content best practices
        Blogs

Managing your site
    Logging in
    Changing your password
    Roles and permissions
    Content workflows (Advanced Workflow Module)
    Working with multiple sites (Subsites Module)
    Languages (Translation Module)

Creating pages and content
    Creating pages
    Inserting links
    Saving draft content
    Previewing changes
    Unpublishing pages
    Removing a page
    Hiding a page
    Creating forms (Userforms Module)

[Cam Findlay]

Cheers Paul, we'll take this into consideration - we've done 1 pass based mostly on sort 3. We may tweak this a bit based on this mostly in terms of naming convensions.

If we drop having a "modules" section then we'll need to ensure that any supported module inclusions make it very clear that the user would need to have that module installed. This could be interesting as at least if we have section "modules" or call it something else, it might not be clear what features are extra from the default install of SilverStripe...

Any ideas of how we might solve this issue?

[Paul Clarke]

I would keep the navigation label as user friendly as possible like "Working with multiple sites" and explain on that page that this experience requires the Subsites Module to be installed. There might be the possibility to include some sort of a flag for "requires additional installation" or "install req." which could be added to anything which is a module in the navigation?

[Jonathon Menz]

Best case scenario is every SilverStripe website comes with a custom made user help section that only includes content relevant to that site - including supplemental help for installed modules and any unique customisations for that website.

Would it be feasible for docs-viewer to be a requirement of Installer and user help to be generated/displayed from within each project instead of an external resource?

Modules could then include their own user help sections and perhaps specify sections that should be removed or replaced from the standard help content - like for KickAssets you might want to replace any sections on managing files.

When I take new clients through the CMS I'm always careful to point out the Help button but with the caveat that none of the custom stuff I've built for them will be documented there. Would be cool if there was an easy way for me to add some additional pages to the help for them so everything they need is covered there.

[camfindlay]

Jono, yes in place custom help docs would be great. For the scope of this current work though I'll keep it to the userhelp stand alone site. 

I think the new docsviewer could be used as you suggest already and we have also added a recommended "doc/en/userguide" folder as part of the supported module spec which you could point docsviewer towards once that gains some traction (we haven't gone over the supported modules and set these user focused docs up and I miay be putting some time in on this soon).

Jono, fancy starting a new focused thread on "in-CMS" help? I think it's a good and much needed improvement.

[Jonathon Menz]

Sure: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/silverstripe-dev/UwzfOpL2Wq0

[Cam Findlay]

Just a heads up we should have a newly reordered userhelp site later this week. Next on the cards is to work in the content at silverstripehelp.net.

On Monday, 2 March 2015 12:01:29 UTC+13, Cam Findlay wrote:

[Cam Findlay]

Just an update, for 3.2 userhelp docs going forward I've rolled in James's (purplespider) content from silverstripehelp.net after discussion with him.

Just deployed this today, it mostly pads out the pages and content creation sections providing some nice step by step guides. 

In some cases we worked the original content together with Jame's to make best use of existing docs. 

Feel free to submit PRs for any errors or improvements you find. 

We didn't include the tutorial videos from Jame's original content however open to feedback on whether we should (just note they were recorded in SS3.1 and we've only updated latest stable version docs (3.2). Would it be valuable to still have to have older UI videos in 3.2 docs? Discuss... :)

[David Alexander]

Looks really good! Nice to see consistency of format between userguide and docs.

I'll start reading and opening PRs for improvements :)

D.

[James Cocker]

Regarding my videos, I certainly don't mind if you use them, even temporarily. However, bear in mind they were originally recorded primarily for my own clients and so some reference specific modules that I often include as well as some other common tweaks I make, so may not be suitable for use in an official guide. They were added as an extra nicety, as the text content should stand on its own. 

So perhaps it would be best to focus on creating new videos for 3.3? Given the even more distinct UI changes it brings. 

While I'd be happy to offer to record them, my screencasting skills aren't the best. (It took several takes to record those videos until I was semi-happy with my voiceover!) Unclecheese's tutorial videos are very nicely done, so would it make sense for him to record the user guide videos too?

James

[Cam Findlay]

Thanks James, We'll hold off the video stuff for now I think. Just having the steps and image based approach from your docs is a huge improvement!

Will have a think about what we can do for 3.3 perhaps but will depend on available time unless someone in the community gives it a crack! Happy to review screencasts.