Radio Documentation Fantasy
Phil Wolff's Tools remind us that QUOTE
The Radio prefererences are jargon heavy. Newbie-friendly narrative, earlier in the tweaking process, drives better user behavior.
UNQUOTE
I have a dream that the major topics can be listed, that a new user needs to know, for example, here is a partial list.
- Installation, Backup, Recovery
- Basic Blogging
- Navigating the Terminology, locating Documentation, accessing Tech Support
- Keeping track of your Tweaking
- What you can easily Tweak
- How to unTweak, as in Oops I did not intend for this to happen
- Themes
- Stories and Shortcuts
- Categories
- News Aggregation
- Plug in Tools
- Pictures
- Gems
- Navigation Links - Introductory
- Advanced Tweaking
- Buying more disk space
- Putting this stuff inside a corporate firewall, on the intranet
Now given each item on the list, what does a new customer need to know, as pre-requisites for getting each item to work effectively?
- HTML-Basic or more advanced?
- Windoze Navigation
- Introduction to Journalism Ethics
- Introduction to staying out of e-law trouble
- In many cases it would be smart to know certain things on the initial topic list before certain other ones.
So we end up with a flow chart in which the connecting lines are coded which stuff is smart to learn first second etc. Each box contains hyper links to where documentation is to help people study those topics. Now many new users might already know some of the stuff on the list, or think they do. So some boxes are colored.
- Green - I already know this stuff
- Red - this topic is a major bottleneck - I need to learn this to help me get into the topics beyond
- Other colors
- Different people different interests in what stuff to learn
Perhaps the first link in each box is: I think I know this stuff already. This link leads you to a pop quiz of stuff you DO need to know about this topic to cope effectively when using it in Radio. On the basis of the score you get (different test each time so people really do have to know the subject to get a good score), reccommendations are made for what documentation you are ready to study.
In the computer hardware world there are certain packages of standards that it is smart to have on the desk top so that a spectrum of applications run effectively.
I think that in Radio learning curve there also needs to be packages of standards or reccommended goals.
- What you need to know to work the basic stuff and stay out of serious trouble.
- Mistakes commonly made by people coming from _____ a particular computing world.
- Common misconceptions to avoid.
11:48:28 PM 
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