Missing Help documentation

The calendar help documentation provides an explanation of the member and editor rights and roles but is missing the explanation of the administrator and building scheduler roles/rights.

When the help was provided in the wiki there was a good explanation for all four roles and rights. Without an explanation of the role/rights for building schedulers and administrators there can be confusion. For example a default administrator can add or remove other administrators. But an administrator who is not a default administrator cannot add or remove other administrators. I did note there was a partial explanation provided in the "Remove Administrators" procedure that addressed some of the limitations on removing default administrators. But even that partial explanation did not state that administrators added by default administrators can not add nor remove other administrators.

If you click the "Read More" link on the Rights and Roles page, it expands down to show the full detail about rights and roles. Do you have any tips on making that section more visible? Should I break out the conceptual part into its own topic without compressing it?

By the way, out of curiosity, on that Rights and Roles page, would you rather see all the procedures on one page compressed into drop-down hotspots, or broken out into individual topics in the Table of Contents on the left? I'd love to get some feedback on this approach to organizing the help content. My intent was to reduce the sometimes intimidating number of topics in the table of contents and help users more quickly find information.

johnsonth wrote:If you click the "Read More" link on the Rights and Roles page, it expands down to show the full detail about rights and roles.

Thanks for the tip. Just for layout consideration, two things prevented me from clicking that link. The first was its location at the end of the editor role section and appearing to be part of that section. The second was mostly because of the links position and the link text "Read More". By being at that location and with the link text saying read more I presumed it was only more text for the editor role.

johnsonth wrote:Do you have any tips on making that section more visible? Should I break out the conceptual part into its own topic without compressing it?

One recommendation is to keep most of the compressed section compressed, with the exception of the one sentence paragraph belonging to the editor role. The visibility and purpose of the link would be improved, in my opinion, by setting off the link from the uncompressed text with the same spacing as a new paragraph. A hint to the additional text may also help. Instead of "Read More" perhaps something like "Read More Rights and Roles Information"

I think keeping the building scheduler and administrator role information compressed may be beneficial since only a small percentage of users will have those roles.

Another approach is to compress part of each section when they become lengthy. For this approach I would leave all the member role information uncompressed. I would compress the Editor role at the end of the first paragraph and put the "Read More" link tucked up to the end of that paragraph very similar to how it is currently after the second paragraph. I would not compress the building scheduler section title and first paragraph down to the colon (before the list of things he/she can do). Then compress the rest of that section and put a "Read More" link after the colon. I would expand the administrator section title and first two paragraphs and add the "Read More" link at the end of the second paragraph. The single sentence regarding troubleshooting issues with rights should remain uncompressed. The privacy section is a toss-up in my mind as what to do with it. My first impression is to compress all but the section title.

JD, thanks for the feedback. I like your suggestions and will probably incorporate them this week.

Tom

johnsonth wrote:I'd love to get some feedback on this approach to organizing the help content.

One thing missing with the new layout is a URL that can take someone directly to a section of interest. It's quite handy to have when you're trying to help someone via the forum.

johnsonth wrote:By the way, out of curiosity, on that Rights and Roles page, would you rather see all the procedures on one page compressed into drop-down hotspots, or broken out into individual topics in the Table of Contents on the left? I'd love to get some feedback on this approach to organizing the help content. My intent was to reduce the sometimes intimidating number of topics in the table of contents and help users more quickly find information.

I find keeping the procedures for all but "Make Your Profile Visible" where they are and compressed makes sense.

It makes some sense to have privacy and visibility listed in the table of contents and a page dedicated to all the aspects of privacy and visibility covered. It is an important enough topic to warrant this treatment. I would then move the procedure for making your profile visible there.

I would also add a procedure, especially for the U.S. and other countries where the privacy is opt out, for making your profile more private.

The first sentence of the "Privacy and Available Member Names in the Calendar" section on the rights and roles page is appropriately placed. The remaining part of the paragraph could be covered on the new privacy page. Add the sentence "For more information about visibility and privacy see [link title: "Privacy and Visibility"; <link>]." to replace the moved portion.

The page on privacy and visibility could then include documentation of the affects of the visibility settings on other LDS.org applications.

RussellHltn wrote:One thing missing with the new layout is a URL that can take someone directly to a section of interest. It's quite handy to have when you're trying to help someone via the forum.

Tom must be fast because there are links to the sections and URLs that can be copied now.