Posted on by Daniel Holbach

RFC: Help app design

Some of you might have noticed the Help app in the store, which has been around for a couple of weeks now. We are trying to make it friendlier and easier to use. Maybe you can comment and share your ideas/thoughts.

Apart from actual bugs and adding more and more useful content, we also wanted the app to look friendlier and be more intuitive and useful.

The latest trunk lp:help-app can be seen as version 0.3 in the store or if you run

bzr branch lp:help-app
less help-app/HACKING

you can run and check it out locally.

Here’s the design Daniel McGuire suggested going forward.

help-mockup

What are your thoughts? If you look at the content we currently have, how else would you expect the app to look like or work?

Thanks a lot Daniel for your work on this! 🙂

  • Pingback: More Help App design ponderings | Daniel Holbach's blog()

  • Bruce Wayne

    Hi Daniel, there’s one thing that stood out for me: the headings are hard to spot, for instance in the first screen the ‘FAQ’ section is more prominent than ‘Welcome’. Should be vice-versa. I would make them bold and give them a darker color.

    A second look made me doubt about the alignment of the text but I’m not sure on that point. Then I spotted the grey search bar on the already grey background combined with a grey text and grey bar at the top that makes it look a bit dull and hard to read. I would suggest adding some white, maybe as a background maybe just for the search bar.

    Other than that, good job! I love people who improve the Ubuntu user experience.
    Keep it up & cheers!

  • Anonymous

    Hi, I wasn’t able to try the app until now, but from looking at the screenshots there are two things I would suggest.

    Instead of the search bar like it is now, there could be a search icon in the header to access the searching functionality, like it is in other apps or scopes, to ensure a consistent user experience.

    Another thing I noticed is that in the third Screenshot, there does not seem to be a possibility to get back from “Basic tasks” to the categories overview. Maybe this could be implemented as a page stack (not sure if that’s the right term), so that the current category appears as the title in the header with an arrow to the left of it to get back to the categories list.

    I hope this helps, keep up the good work 🙂