A poor Help System

1. Computerized help systems have to be very, very helpful if people will ever bother using them rather than asking a nearby human. The first step to achieving this level of helpfulness is always being ready for use within about one second of being summoned. Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s help system (on this laptop, at least) takes about eight seconds.
2. The front page of the help system contains seven items, which are worth examining in detail, because they demonstrate how users and developers — even documentation developers — think about things in different ways.

• “Desktop“. This makes the unwarranted assumption that people will consider the items in Gnome’s panels, for example, to be part of the “desktop”, rather than being above or below the desktop.
• “Applications“. This makes the unwarranted assumption that people visiting the top-level help page — that is, people seeking help without having started any particular program — will nevertheless know what “application” they need to use for the thing they want to do.
• “Other Documentation“. “Other” is a slippery word: it works only if the rest of the categories are already clear, and they’re not.
• “Man Pages“. Teeheeheehee.
• “About Ubuntu“. This isn’t help, it’s a manifesto. Nothing wrong with manifestos, but they don’t belong on the front page of a help system.
• “Hoary Release Notes“. Again, this is interesting information, but it’s not help.
• “Ubuntu Quick Guide“. This is a cool idea, but unfortunately what’s provided is not a quick guide. A quick guide would be one printable page, explaining (a) how to find programs, (b) how to find your files, (c) how to turn off the computer, and (d) how to get more help. Instead, the Ubuntu “Quick Guide” is dozens of pages long.

1. Part of the problem is that the Guide is greatly caught up in its own minutiae. For example, it contains this morsel: “Also in this release is the FAQ Guide which was ported from the Ubuntu Wiki to Docbook and is now a permanent feature of the Ubuntu documentation project.”If you know too much to understand the problem with that sentence, here it is again, translated into a simulation of how a regular person would understand it: “Also in this spurt is the Worple Guide which was worpled from the Ubuntu Worple to Worple and is now a permanent feature of the Ubuntu worple worple.”I’m one of the 0.000002 percent of humans who are subscribed to the Ubuntu Documentation mailing list, and they’re lovely people, but even I just don’t care about this kind of administrivia. How will reading this help anyone use Ubuntu? It won’t.
2. A real help system would have items on its front page like “Connecting to the Internet”, “Using files from Windows”, “Printing”, “Chatting online”, “Playing music”, “Making CDs and DVDs”, and “Troubleshooting”.
3. Having said all that, people have become used to the idea that systems designed for browsing will be poorly organized and out of date (which is why search engines are more popular than Web directories, for example), so what they usually do instead is search. Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s help system doesn’t even have a search function.
4. Inside the help system, help for the majority of programs is written in the form of a book. (For example, and I’m sorry to pick on the Ubuntu Quick Guide one more time, its very first information-containing page says insolently that “admonitions will be found throughout the book”.) Books are useful, but they do not belong in on-screen help systems. On-screen help needs to be written in a different style, with a different tone, and at much shorter length.

Problems with Gaim

1. When I am not connected to the Internet, Gaim nevertheless tries to connect every minute or two, and complains every time it fails.
2. Gaim displays my own AIM account in my buddy list. This is not very useful, as I don’t send instant messages to myself.
3. Gaim displays each AIM account using not one icon, but two.
4. Chat windows have a “Send” button, which will slow some people down by misleading them into thinking that they need to click the button every time they type something, instead of pressing Enter.
5. IRC channel windows feature an enormous “Remove” button for removing the channel from your buddy list. I have clicked this button dozens of times, but never on purpose.
6. Gaim’s preferences are ridiculously complicated, with some options nested three levels deep. They are also poorly worded; for example, several checkboxes begin with the word “Ignore”.
7. Gaim uselessly opens its login window for about two seconds every time it quits.

Problems using Evolution

1. Evolution’s menus are alarmingly obscure and complex. For example, it has a menu unhelpfully titled “Actions” (isn’t everything I might want to do an action?) that is 22 items long.
2. Clicking the “Exchange” button produces a panel that, by default, contains nothing at all, not even any indication of what it is for.
3. By default, Evolution does not store a local copy of the folders and messages on my Imap account; it downloads them again every time it starts up.
4. When I am not connected to the Internet, Evolution’s attempt to download the messages all over again produces the error “Host lookup failed: imap.myrealbox.com: Temporary failure in name resolution”. Since the lack of an Internet connection is by far the most common cause of failed “host lookup” (what?), it would make more sense for Evolution just to go into offline mode in such cases.
5. Evolution’s Preferences dialog, and its “Account Editor”, both fall off the bottom of the screen by default.

Problems using Firefox

1. Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one.
2. The icons for all available toolbar buttons in Firefox face directly towards you, except for the Home button, making it look out of place.
3. Firefox’s “Import Wizard” (whaddya mean, “wizard?”) is completely inoperable. It consists of the label “Import Preferences, Bookmarks, History, Passwords and other data from:”, a large empty space, and three buttons with no labels that don’t do anything.
4. I frequently check my mail on MyRealBox and Yahoo Mail, and visit other sites with similarly misconfigured security certificates. Firefox complains about the certificates using alerts that are awfully designed. (Disclaimer: I redesigned them in 2001, but the designs have yet to be implemented.)
5. The “Character Encoding” submenu is unnecessarily complicated and difficult to use. (Disclaimer: I redesigned that too, and my design was used in Epiphany, but not in Mozilla.)
6. By default, the arrangement of the Bookmarks window is such that the name of every bookmarks folder is truncated.
7. The form controls Firefox draws in Web pages are not just inconsistent with those in the rest of the operating system, they are quite possibly the ugliest interactive controls seen in any graphical interface since AmigaDOS 2.04. For example, text fields have borders that, by default, are visible on only two sides out of four. <select> elements are rendered not as normal option menus, but as much less efficient drop-down scrolling listboxes. And radio buttons look like they were drawn in the dark with a broken pencil.

Difficulty using Music CDs

1. The tasks of copying music from a CD in uncompressed format, copying music from a CD in compressed format, playing music on a CD, and playing music on a hard disk are performed with — I am not making this up — four separate programs with four different interfaces: Nautilus, Sound Juicer, CD Player, and Music Player.
2. Or at least they would be, except copying in uncompressed format doesn’t work. Dragging a track from Nautilus’s CD window into a folder looks like it will work, and it doesn’t produce an error message, but it doesn’t produce anything else either.
3. Double-clicking on a track in a CD window produces an alert of mammoth proportions and comical contents. It begins: “The filename ‘Untitled 1′ indicates that this file is of type ‘WAV Audio’. The contents of this file indicates that it is of type ‘unknown’. If you open this file, the file might present a security risk to your system.” A security risk to the system? Ah, of course — that must be because it’s a CD of songs by Cat Stevens.
4. We’re already well past the two-short-sentences limit for an alert people might possibly read, but there’s more. “Do not open the file unless you created it yourself, or received the file from a trusted source.” (I guess that rules out CDs from all major record companies, dangit.) “To open the file, rename the file” (I can’t, it’s on a CD!) “to the correct extension” (rename it to an extension?) “for ‘unknown’” (and the correct extension for “unknown” would be what?), “then open the file normally.” (As opposed to what?) “Alternatively, use the Open With menu to choose a specific application for the file.” The coup de grâce: by default, for CD tracks, there is no such menu.
5. There is, however, an “Open With ‘Totem Movie Player’” menu item, which plays the music track in, of all things, a movie player program. So, I apologize for my earlier error: there are not four programs involved by default in managing music on CDs. There are five.