GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 75312
Menu panel should have a help menu
Last modified: 2015-03-24 13:01:17 UTC
The menu panel should have a help menu, because we want our software to offer help to our users. The Ximian menu panel from GNOME 1.x does this pretty well.
Wasn't this removed on purpose?
Well, maybe it was. Bah, humbug. IMHO that was a mistake. Setting priority to "low" until the maintainers mark it WONTFIX. :(
It was removed on purpose? This is News To Me. My gut feeling is that this would be very wrong, but... perhaps someone can explain to me?
I think it only existed in the Ximian flavour of the menu panel. So I don't think it was removed... But... I'm not a big fan of this menu, because I'm concerned about the effects of having two help menus visible on the screen for every application. Maybe I'm fretting needlessly, I dunno.
Maybe this should remain a ximian customization for the time being. In gnome 2.2 when we (hopefully) replace the menu panel with a menubar applet, help could be added as an option. Just an idea, even though i'm not particularly for or against this.
I athink its a nice feature ... However, it is an enhancement request so I'm marking it as such and moving to the 2.0.x milestone
Reasonable enough. I'm sure Ximian will definitely be adding it back :)
Calum, Nils - do you agree with Seth here. If so I'll mark WONTFIX
Seth's point about having two Help menus on the screen might be valid, I think we'd need to usability test that to be sure. I think people would still be more likely to go to the 'nearest' help menu, though. In principle I like the idea of a Help menu on the panel because if nothing else it's a much more logical place to put the "About GNOME" menu item, plus distros could add links to their own tech support documents etc. here. But I won't be desperately upset if we decide it's too late to go in for 2.0.
hrm - i thought i commented on this one. I'd prefer to have a help menu as well - but understand the reservations that people have. It would be nice to run a usability study on the whole menu (maybe a card sort plus running thru the g2 menus) thing once things have calmed down a bit...
Seth doesn't really agree with Seth here. I should clarify that my official stance is "I don't feel like I know enough to decide". If I had to pick now I would say "no help menu", just because its harder to remove things from interfaces than it is to add them.
Hum, not to feel like a complete idiot...but I rather like my little help icon in my menu panel as show in - http://www.gnome.org/~gman/GNOME2-apps.png
Honestly, I think we have bigger fish to fry-- this is one of those issues where it might really not matter, so we might as well do something that's got a more obvious benefit that is more important.
Oh btw ... what's supposed to go into this menu ?
Created attachment 11616 [details] [review] a patch
uhh so yeah this patch adds gnome-about and the yelp launcher to the new help menu. Also changes actions to desktop (theres another bug on this). Mark did I implement this right? Usability do we want this? I kind of like it, makes gnome-about much more obvious.
/me enters her resounding vote for a help menu and wanders back into her cave, but pauses to say: Something that running usability test teaches you is that humans will constantly surprise you by taking unexpected paths to accomplish a given task . For example, back when I was re-designing the Evolution search bar for our 1.2 release, I ran several tests on Outlook users to see how they interacted with my proposed design for it. To my surprise, after giving them a task where they were supposed to search for mail from a particular sender, more than half of them *ignored the search bar entirely* and used a key-press-to-scroll-message-list method of searching instead. I was a little miffed that my bar didn't get the analysis I wanted-- until I realized that it didn't matter, because I had still learned what these users needed. What is the moral? Well, when people using GNOME need to get help, they won't necessarily take the path that we as developers believe to be most logical. Instead of using an app's help menu, they might just fire up a web browser and start googling, or they might use a "Help" menu at the top of the screen because they've noticed it before and they know it is always there. As designers/engineers/compassionate usability people, our job should be to accomodate as many of these methods of getting help as possible. To this end, we should keep the Help menu in there at the top of the screen. -Anna
anna et al. I need suggestion for wording/terminology etc. I'm not really happy with the wording in the patch so suggestion would be helpful. Currently the menu includes Menu Item Tooltip --------- ------- Contents Get help with GNOME About GNOME GNOME was brought to you by... for Contents maybe it should be Help Browser, Browse your system help files? What does everyone think? Also if this patch is applied, we should probably also path the application vfolder.info file to not show help.
Dave: the patch looks good. Feel free to commit to HEAD when you've sorted out the details. Thanks.
ok so usability I need the final word, is it ok to add the help menu, what should the menu entries be, and what should the tooltips be. While i'm at it, is it ok to change actions to desktop?
Created attachment 11721 [details] [review] updated patch (only adds help doesn't change s/actions/desktop)
I'd still be more comfortable if this Help menu could include an item pointing at Help for the current application as well, but of course we can't do that because the current application loses focus as soon as you click the global Help menu :) I guess my main concern is that we're adding a menu that only has two items in it, one of which will never be used by 99% of our users 99% of the time. Until we have more to put on it (like a Search... menu item, which Yelp doesn't support yet IIRC), I think we'd almost be better just adding a launcher to the default menu panel that opens Yelp at the top level Contents page... that would take up less room, too :)
to be honest the menu takes up very little space (about the equivalent of two launchers). We could add other stuff to it, nils had mentioned on irc adding the bug tool here i think, and maybe some relevant links to gnome internet pages (gnome-faq etc.)
Hmm yes, that's an idea, I guess it might make sense to move the three links from gnome-about onto this menu. (I don't see much point in replicating them though, if you're going to have to go the menu to launch gnome-about anyway).
The other thing is though we don't want to put too much in this menu, as distros are likely to add stuff here as well (like links to their support stuff etc.) ximian did this in gnome 1.4. I'd be happy with: help - > Help Browser Report a bug About GNOME please decide soon as freeze is next week.
I guess we didn't decide in time, did we... :/
Do you guys have decided what is the best so we can try it in 2.3.x ?
I think that we should go with dave's patch for 2.3. There was talk of the menu panel with the menu for the desktop. To me this fits in well with having a help menu.
Comment on attachment 11616 [details] [review] a patch An update has been posted
What is the status of attachment 11721 [details] [review] (Comment #21 above)? I'd like to add some meta-data for it but I don't know how/if this was resolved.
Okay, so it looks like the final decision was to do: help - > Help Browser Report a bug About GNOME All patches are way out of date, though.
I guess so, I'm kind of with Seth on this one where 'I'm just not sure'. If this were implemented like Calum suggested, where the Help Browser could provide application specific help then my ignorance would turn to bliss.
Created attachment 30432 [details] [review] Proposed patch.
The attached patch adds a help menu to the panel. I didn't add action buttons for now, but if it's desired, I can add them easily. regs, Chris
Thanks Manny - I don't think I'd implement this as actions, just use normal menu items. The benefit to implementing it using actions would be that you could drag them onto the panel, but I don't think we want. However, the main issue here is deciding whether we want to do this or not. A vague agreement from almost two years ago probably doesn't hold true still.
So, can we get the discussion going again and get a decision on this issue? Usability people? What's your opinion on this? I agree with the original plan and feel that adding Report a bug, links to docs on the web etc is a good plan.
Dropping priority - this isn't a priority until its clear we're still sure we should do this
note the design in bug 161613 includes a help menu item
Should we mark this as depending on that bug then? Or maybe even closing it as duplicate to that?
Kjartan: I guess the plan is to look at the bugs tracked by bug #162009 once we commit the layout proposed in bug #161613... (Well, that's what I intended to do)
Usability people: the new menu layout in HEAD has a help menu item in the menu bar. Should I add a "Report a bug" menu item?
Vincent: I don't think we need that as a top level item. Hopefully our software isn't so buggy that people will need such quick access to tell us where we've gone wrong. :-) I think the new menu layout adds a help item and takes care of this bug so I'm going to close it out. Perhaps we could open a new bug if someone feels a 'Report bug' top level menu item is important.