Attending this year (Feb 27 - Mar 2): Rob Chandler. Char James-Tanny, Dana Worley. Tech lead: Paul O'Rear.
Tues/Weds/Thurs:
There are no Keynote sessions. None of the main sessions mention much about the upcoming Win 8 and VS 2012. Thanks Paul for organizing these great help related session: - VS 11 Help - Monday morning
Paul O'Rear, Malcolm Dickson Take is through the latest VS 11 help system (currently in Beta).
- HV2 now only touches links. Self branded help is mostly under user control. Gone are complicated transforms.
- Each book can now have it's own branding package. Default fall-back branding package in runtime folder.
- Enterprise deployment - Can define their own end point. Registry overrides to force help Offline/Online or fall back to Online/Offline.
- Help Ideas / Bluesky - Monday arvo Devs Ian Hollier, Gerry, Phil Black, Justin and team demo various ideas for filtering and fall back.
- Help API - Rob Chandler demos his code examples that exercise the HV 2 API.
- Windows 8 Help - Wed: Help team for Windows 8 demo Online / Offline help experience.
- Help experience = Less distractions. Clearer and more intuitive.
- Run lots of usability tests.
- No immersive help Experience - ie. No big Help Viewer experience with TOC Index Bookmarks etc.
- Most aeas of Windows have (?) icon. Contextual help.
- Help pane has search only. Vendors and Enterprise can add their help to single area.
- Metro apps also called "Modern apps". Should be designed for usability not with extensive help. Intuitive and simple.
- Help Content = "How do I do something" (main help content). Also "How do I fix something".
- Help
- Direct, Clear, Concise.
- Like writing to a user or friend
- Links to support or how to (no dead ends).
- Help should not be lengthy or detailed.
- Used to clarify confusing User Experience.
- Classic Vs Metro Help
- Help can open in Metro Browser or Classic Browser (Configurable).
- More Video and diagrams added where applicable.
- Jean Philippe Bagel - Content Publishing Director - alias jpbagel
- Informal talk with JP on future of interfaces and help.
- Cool new interfaces for tablet devices - FlipBoard, PhotoMedia, Google Currents
- Lou Berner and Edd Pine - SQL Server UX
- Talk about there UX challengers and get our views on there UI ideas.
- Continuous Publishing
- Online Help - Data Drive Decision making -- New help links reduce support costs by 9x%
- Add Help only where help is needed.
- Thusday
- Girls headed home. I spend morning & Lunch talking to developers Ian and Gerry, also Jason and Malcolm.
- Afternoon Paul does Kiosk demos for HV 2. I talk to Bing guy about search problems for MSDN Library.
- Also good chat with Jeff on problems of improving help and understanding the our online data.
- Scoping (relationships of data graphs); Filtering (Meta data/attributes); Search (Data) - Paper in progress.
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