[FM Discuss] some thoughts on friendly manuals

[adam hyde]

hi,

i went to the mozilla community meeting in Whistler, Canada last
week...I will send a report event shortly...

it was a very interesting event. Mozilla  it seems is converting itself
into a movement. I learned alot about Moz, and it also provoked me to
think a lot about fm and where we are going and how we talk about fm,
booki etc...essentially i think we should be shouting out more about our
achievements...we are, afterall, at the bleeding edge of publishing, but
more on this later...

what i wanted to mention quickly is that one of the new heads of the doc
team (I forgot his name but i will remedy this in the report) mentioned
that he found "making the docs friendly" increased the effectiveness of
the docs. Now moz being what is has such a huge amount of online traffic
that they can measure the increased traffic when they change the color
of links and then gauge the effectiveness because the smallest changes
become statistically significant. The demo he gave was when they changed
a small part of a doc from a very formal style (the SUMO support pages
are very formal) to an informal chatty style they had an incredible
increase of traffic. well, stats are stats of course, and i dont know
what measures they were using (time spent on a page, number of hits?
etc) but i believe this evidence as it is also what i have always
personally believed about docs (you only hear what you want to
heh!)...maybe janet can add something to this as he knows the chap and
was also at the same presentation/discussion

it made me think of fm (many of our docs are friendly) and this project:
http://diveintohtml5.org/

and then i thought also about the above example (html5) and how it uses
public domain images AND that fm is working with archive.org to
implement booki for proofing OCR scanned materials...which lead me back
to thinking..why dont we use some of the images from public domain books
in our manuals? could be interesting to start talking about this and
trying a few things out....

adam




-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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