Workstation branding on login screen (GDM)

[Máirín Duffy]

Okay me and Ray grabbed a whiteboard a few minutes ago -

On 10/02/2014 12:15 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> This is a flawed assumption. A few cases to think about:
>
> - Stephen's aforementioned lab situation use case. I'm sitting down to
> work in the computer lab. I didn't install the machine, I have no clue
> what it's running.
>
> - Developer use case, I have multiple VMs I'm working with; maybe I'm
> testing software on different OSes. I'm trying to locate the correct VM.
> (This works in the physical case too. I'm a lowly sysadmin who has been
> told to go 'reboot the Fedora machine' - which one is it?)

Ray's answer here was that the users can do the following (using a vague 
GOMS-like approach to describe the path here):

- click upper-right corner (1)
- scan menu (2)
- click unlabeled settings icon (screwdriver + wrench) (1)
- scan menu (2)
- click "details" (not "about this computer" not "help" not "system 
information" etc, just "details") (1)
- view Fedora logo and 'fedora 20' under it (2)

If we attribute 1 point to clicks and 2 points to scan the weight of 
this path is 9 points. Which is high, and not as casual as the logo on 
GDM is (which is essentially 0 points for both the first boot case and 
any subsequent fresh logins, particularly in the lab case above.)

We don't have the market share or even anywhere near the market share to 
rely on our users awareness of our identity latently.

Anyway, assuming we'll keep the logo in GDM, the computer lab case is 
served fine but the developer / sysadmin trying to identify the machine 
case is still a real pain.

> - This is just a modified version of the lab situation case - but when
> I'm doing outreach with the Girl Scouts or at local schools, often the
> kids go home with a live USB of Inkscape and Gimp and all the software
> they learned how to use. We didn't talk about the OS much at all. Maybe
> their parents or friends want their own cweet USB key setup too. What
> are they using? What do they Google for? How do they figure it out?
>
>> , and if they like Fedora they'll "sell" it to their
>> friends and colleagues for us.
>
> Last use case above - they are trying to sell it but don't even know
> what it is that they have.
>
> Even worse - they have this thing, they don't know exactly what it is,
> and they don't know how to get help for it. If you're a girl scout who
> took an Inkscape class with me 6 months ago today, and you run into a
> problem with your LiveUSB stick - where do you even start to go for help
> when all you have is the desktop / stick itself (if you're lucky and
> it's still booting?)

For the "need" help case, Ray mentioned that on first run GNOME help 
pops up. My concern isn't for the first use case though - it's for say 
the student who's had their USB key for a while and suddenly, let's say 
a mysterious dbus error message pops up (since that's happened to the 
students in question during class) -

The error messages themselves can't be relied upon to provide guidance 
to an appropriate place for help. Sure, they don't know what support 
system is best for me, whether it's a particular corporate help desk, a 
particular distro commnunity, or the upstream community for that app in 
particular. But also, there's no standard for error messages, a lot of 
apps have very bad ones, and sometimes the app is in such a state it's 
difficult to even display anything useful to the user. So that's out as 
a venue to guide the user.

If the user needs help today on our desktop, what can they do? The only 
way I know to get help from the desktop is to:

- trigger activities overview (1)
- type 'help' (2)
- scan help screen (2)

(5 pts)

The problem with GNOME help, at least from the Fedora Workstation user 
context:

- If I need to talk to a human being via chat or message or forum, 
there's no referral here
- It talks about GNOME. It doesn't talk about Fedora. So then I'd start 
Googing around for GNOME help (if I didn't know what the computer was.) 
If the error I had was an SELinux issue or a kernel panic, looking for 
help with GNOME won't help me.
- If I type "dbus error" in the help app it gives no results. It has a 
limited and static set of information as far as I can tell.
- If I type "dbus error" and no results are given, I am not offered the 
opportunity to ask a new question to get help

This is assuming that the system functions enough for the user to be 
able to navigate to help. If the user doesn't know what it is that they 
are running and they need help, they need to know what to look for. If 
the system is so messed up they can't even boot it or can't use it 
(frozen screen), there is no answer.

Anyway, an idea Ray and I talked about is to have a direct link to the 
Help app from the system menu in the upper right corner, which would at 
least knock it down from 5 points (which include knowing to type 
'help'), to 3 points (click on menu, scan). It would make help more 
prominent in that it would be visible under casual circumstances during 
normal usage of the desktop (vs in the huge almost never browsed stack 
that is the set of apps available in the app list.)

Does anybody have thoughts about that as a potential improvement?

Even better would be an intermediate help panel which would explicitly 
outline your venues for help. And this could be overridden by 
repackagers, again think corporate desktop. So for Fedora you might get 
pointed to ask.fedoraproject.org but for a corporate respin you might 
get pointed to another URL.

We have some great resources within Fedora to get help, like 
ask.fedoraproject.org - but there's no link to these resources from the 
actual system itself. None.

~m