Sent on 4.15.2008:
Heather Anne Harrison
Technical Writer
Information Services and Technology (IS&T)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room W92-152
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-8969
aurora@mit.edu
Thalia Feedback
Structure/Organization
This section covers feedback related to the structure and organization of help content in the Thalia site.
Table of Contents
There has been much improvement in this area in the underlying structure in focusing more on tasks customers would be trying to complete than features, although many titles in the listing are cut off. That makes it hard to know what items to select since you can't always see all the identifying info. The menus also seem buggy at times not showing the nesting properly - this may also be related to longer titles.
Recommendation: Create an index page that shows all the documents. Make this the direct navigate to page for help links and the "home" page for help (see navigation section below for more on this need). It will let customers read the whole titles and easily see all the options without having to click lots of sub-items open and closed to find what they want. This also makes the action-oriented sub-titles more visible on first glance to customers. Making the left navigation wider or wrapping the text would improve the information being cut off.
Navigation
On the Thalia Welcome (http://thalia.mit.edu/help/) page, the center body text has links that appear to be help-related "Organize," "Present," and "Find," however those are actually informational/promotional materials about service capabilities and do not contain any howto documentation. The howto documentation is located within "Help" at the left column.
Within Thalia there are two links "Help" and "Quickstart". Help goes to the best currently available help listing. "Quickstart" goes to the informational/promotional Thalia page. In IS&T Support, the term "Quickstart" refers to one hour training courses (or videos of them)offered at lunch time by the training team to give a quick overview of the topic and get customers started using a product or service. Using that term seems confusing.
Recommendations:
• Link to help in the central body of the Welcome Page (http://thalia.mit.edu/help/) to make it easier to find. Have help links within Thalia go directly to an index help page that lists all the help documents.
• Each page for "Organize," "Present," and "Find," should contain links to the appropriate howtos such as the "Working with Slideshows" section for "Present" via a "For more information, see <link to the slideshows part of the help>.
• Change the "Quickstart" term to something else less easily confused with a one hour training class.
Issues:
• Clicking "Contents" icon sometimes gets you just one item "Welcome to Thalia" and you have to click to unfold the additional options. Recommend figuring out why it's intermittent behavior and displaying the above recommended index page at that point.
• Clicking on the titles of the top level closed books and the book image does not always open the menus. You have to click the + sign. Lower levels clicking titles works for opening, but not closing. Consistency is good. Making it easier by clicking titles working seems the better choice. Whatever is chosen, I recommend making them all behave the same way.
• Loading an external page in the doc display frame such as the MIT Policies (off the terms of service) results in not being able to load help files afterwards. This is potentially frustrating and confusing behavior.
• Lots of "clicks" to get to information frustrates customers. The menus have to be clicked to show sub-items and there are often even deeper nested items. Answers themselves link to other answers for instructions on how to complete parts of procedurals. That should be limited as much as possible to things that are other activities (like having to get an account before you can login) as opposed to linking to a separate screen shot or set of steps that could be included in place.
Recommendations: Reduce the number of links to screen shots or sub-procedures by including the content directly in the relevant documents. Create an index page that shows all the available documents. It will let customers read the entire titles and easily see all the options without having to navigate/click many of sub-items open and closed to find content.
Links/URLs
Some links seems broken or confusing. "Misc > Where can I see a list of Known Issues" has a link to known issues that does not work. "Can I upload more than one item at the same time?" has a link to "upload the zip file" that is an anchor that is too close to the end to go there in a way that makes sense. In those cases, having a titled sub-header with the name of the link makes it more clear where to look.
There are no direct URLs for the documentation/help pages. This makes it challenging for the helpdesk to share URLs for specific pages of documentation while helping a customer. Having them navigate the site takes longer and can be more challenging to do over the phone, email or IM. As a workaround, I tried to view the frame with the help information. While the URL seems meaningful, it displays the main thalia page instead of the desired content. This lack of direct URLs also makes it very hard to bookmark a useful piece of information to return directly to it later.
Recommendations: Utilize the Publishing Checklist (http://web.mit.edu/ist/admin/styleguide/pubcheck.html) before go-live of new pages to ensure all links work and your set of standards are met by the new content. Help pages should have direct URLS that work for bookmarks and sharing with others (over the phone, in email or IM) for help purposes and to simplify returning to useful pages again.
Formatting/Style
IS&T standard procedural documents have a format for step-by-step procedures. Usability testing shows this minimizes confusion.
Example: http://itinfo.mit.edu/article.php?id=8817
Feedback from the help desk on many SWRT projects and usability testing shows that screen shots help customers be more comfortable because they can visually confirm they're doing the right things and experiencing the expected behavior. Screen shots can also help customers find icons or see how to correctly enter text.
Language and style don't always match the IS&T standard. Some examples of best practices are:
• Keep sentence structures simple.
• Address customers in the second person.
• Divide sections clearly so information blocks aren't dense and/or overwhelming at first glance.
• Keep all the information needed for tasks on one page so users don't have to click back and forth a lot. That causes them to lose their place, feel frustrated, and interpret the task as more complicated than it is. It also makes printing complete instructions challenging.
• Cross link in other places customers might look for the information.
• Keep more advanced/system administrator content separate from end user procedurals and information. The audiences are different and the more advanced content can be intimidating to end-users. Providing links within the end user docs to more advanced content is appropriate.
Example: "Can I upload more than one item at the same time?" The sheer volume of dense text is intimidating on first glance. The content could be broken into sub-sections with dividing lines and section titles to display the information in more digestible and easy to read chunks. It contains no screen shots. It contains system administrator only content in a general user document. It's located under "Working With Libraries", but might just as easily be expected to be found under "Working with Items" and linked from the "How do I Upload an Item" page.
Recommendations: Match standard IS&T style more closely in information presentation techniques as customers are already used to finding information that way. Use Step/Result format and increase the number of screen shots included in procedurals. Break up dense information into sub-sections that more clearly define different tasks.
Search
Search generally seems to work well within the Thalia help system, but the results are presented in a fashion that makes it impossible to tell where the content is located in the hierarchy. Combined with the lack of direct URLs, this makes it very challenging for help desk staff to tell a customer where to find information. It also makes it hard to find information again unless you can remember the exact search terms used the first time.
Search executed from the ist locker does not include the Thalia help system content or even reach the main thalia page directly. This could easily be confusing for customers looking for thalia information and help.
Recommendation: Provide information on navigational location of pages when they're displayed. Perhaps as a trail at the top of the answer that says something like Thalia > Working with Libraries > Can I upload more than one item at the same time?
Publish ist locker support page that will show up in searches from the IS&T locker, provide links to the help information, provide support information, set service and support expectations, and make service seem a bit more officially related to IS&T.
See draft: https://web.mit.edu/ist/dontindex/aurora/thalia/thalia.html).
An example for a completed one is: http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/webpublishing/wiki/
Content Gaps
This section identifies content areas that are either not covered in the existing documentation suite or are not covered in as much depth as may be desirable.
Where to get help/what is supported?
Technical requirements: includes supported formats, supported browsers.
How to get an account/request a domain
Who is eligible for accounts?
Printing: how to print, photo/color printing options. Copy tech info?
Stock Answers: There are existing known issues documented. Should any (or other common questions) be moved to stock answer system? That is the standard place customers and the helpdesk go to look for that kind of information.
Access/permissions: How does this work?
Recommendation: provide content on the above topics. Many could fit in the ist locker service page recommended above. Add a Thalia section to the official IS&T Stock Answers containing, at a minimum, pointers to existing troubleshooting and known issue documents. Additional material may also be appropriate to add to the system, especially once the Hermes project goes live and allows greater community contribution of content.
Helpdesk Feedback
This section summarizes feedback/questions from the helpdesk training session. Some of these have already been addressed in updates subsequent to the training session.
1. What are the supported formats?
2. How do I get an account?
3. What browsers are supported? Firefox w/flash 8 or better. Safari probably works; not tested. IE: no. When will IE be supported, if ever?
4. Bulk uploads - how do you create zip archives and upload?
5. Bulk upload is very slow. Are there recommendations (off-peak hours, etc) to make it go faster?
6. Need more info on Metadata - can edit individually or in groups. How to edit and use?
7. Tab delimitated file for metadata for bulk uploads - how?
8. When is it the right answer vs dspace, flickr, dome, etc. Suggest table that shows options/features/differences for each including content such as storage limits.
9. Common issue http vs https - should be FAQ/Stock Answer
10. Printing - how, recommendations, photo printing?
11. Domain settings/options - who can set? How? Who to contact if user wants changes?
12. Guest: error if https/https, what access/permissions guests have
13. Access control: how to manage; who gets to manage
14. Are there Quotas/limits/policies?
15. Thalia handles non-images. Doesn't care what the file type is, but what will display? How does it work? What is the use case? Are there slideshow limitations by file type?
16. Backups/data loss expectation setting. A statement on this could be useful.
17. MIT or IS&T Search for Thalia docs? Will it work? If so, how to exclude/include in search?
18. Does it have service page?
Overall Comments
Core technical content is well above average provided by content owners to pubs members, that said, my inner editor frequently wanted to improve language, readability, formatting, and information structure to make it more accessible to customers and reduce confusion/frustration. It was clearly written by a talented technical resource, but not an expert in technical communications aimed at a general end user audience.
I estimate it would take approximately two months of full time effort from a technical writer to complete the full review, content edits, restructuring, formatting changes, and migration efforts to move the content into IS&T maintained space. To do the content work in the existing system would likely take longer as the pubs team lacks experience with the existing Thalia documentation system.