Address high-level user experience issues
There are a number of high-level user experience issues with Yelp and GNOME's user docs. These include:
- The experience is visually uninviting, this especially applies to the landing page
- No easy way in - the front page is a big collection of links. It's a lot of information to process.
- Navigation experience - there's little sign-posting for each link; users often have to click through several dense pages of links to get to content
- Confusing navigation model - it sometimes feels like a maze, with circular links and multiple routes to the same page
I think we need to take a step back and reassess our user help offering. Things that I think we should aim for include:
- An easy-to-digest landing page, which includes a short set of categories, plus links to some of the most popular and relevant content
- The landing page should be visually attractive
- Prominent content which helps people get the most out of GNOME, such as highlighting features that they might not be aware of
- A simple navigation structure, which avoids circular links
- Effective use of search
- Integration with downstream support
The support sites for other desktop OSs show how some of these things could be done. There's also some initial design work on the wiki.