User documentation improvements

User documentation improvements

by Helen Foster -
Number of replies: 3
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Following the UX Survey results in which help documentation was highlighted as an area needing improvement, Mary and I talked with Moodle Senior UX designer, Hina, about what we could learn from the survey comments and where to start on making user documentation improvements.

We came up with a number of action points as follows:

  1. Improve each of the activity start pages, such as Assignment activity, to provide a quick guide for the activity, with more detailed information about settings etc. added to other activity pages.
  2. Make it clearer whether documentation applies to teachers or to admins by using the heading 'Site administration settings' on activity settings pages. Investigate adding a note at the top of pages with info for admins only.
  3. Go through all activity pages, checking the 'See also' links are up to date and making consistency improvements.
  4. Go through tracker issues labelled docs_required and add user documentation where necessary according to the Docs required issues process.
  5. Delete pages in the 3.9 docs for plugins not updated for 3.5 (see pages linking to the infobox plugin template for the list of plugin documentation pages).
  6. Identify areas of the documentation which need rewriting and reorganising to make the information easier to understand.

You may have noticed that Mary and I are already working on some of these action points. As always, if you can help in any way with the documentation it would be much appreciated! Many thanks to all our documentation contributors, including everyone helping with documentation in other languages. smile

Average of ratings: Useful (5)
In reply to Helen Foster

Re: User documentation improvements

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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help documentation was highlighted as an area needing improvement,.. What an understatement!

If you mean the https://docs.moodle.org/XY/ wikis, they are broken beyond mere improvement. Only a complete rewrite/redesign could bring something useful - time spent on "improvements" is lost time.
In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: User documentation improvements

by Tim Hunt -
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I disagree.
Average of ratings: Useful (4)
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: User documentation improvements

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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Well, I didn't expect much agreement, there were no arguments to agree. Wasn't inclined to spend time, because that time too will be wasted. Still put that note, because I saw that valuable resources are diverted to this fruitless task.

Now you've asked and may be others are raising eye brows, here's an ultra short version. I will not discuss or explain this any further. If there is sufficient demand, I will sit down and collect the forum threads going back to at least a decade.

The biggest reason for failure is that the MoodleDocs is completely organic. No ToC, no chapters/volumes (think of the sub-systems that were added to Moodle the last couple of years), no quality checking. People create loose pages on impulse then leave. And the official maintainers make a stand saying they are non-technical and do only administrative work. Ironically the biggest administrative work, duplicating the wikis every six months, makes matters worse exponentially. Outdated information are just being moved forward. Every time somebody comes up with a problem, the standard answer is, "It is a wiki. Please update yourself!" The person could be anybody, who just ventured without a clue.

There are other problems. No point in discussing them as long as the mentality above remains.