Re: [Libreoffice] Better wording for 'Update links' question

On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 13:06 -0500, Joe Smith wrote:
> On 12/21/2010 12:09 PM, Jan Holesovsky wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32548
> >
> > The bug says: when I open a certain .odp document, I get a pop-up
> > question asking "Update all links? Yes/No"
> >
> > Anybody who knows this functionality, can you please provide a better
> > wording? ;-)  Just post it here, I'll integrate it.
> >
> > Thank you a lot,
> > Kendy
>
> Believe me, I'm no fan of this cryptic prompt, but I'm afraid this won't 
> be an improvement. The wording of the prompt is not the primary problem.

I'm not sure if I agree with that view.  This *will* be an improvement,
and although the wording alone will not be enough to fix this
*completely*, improving the wording itself is a step in the right
direction.

> Experts already know what "Update links?" means; non-experts will not 
> understand enough to answer the question correctly even with improved 
> wording.

I disagree here.  You tend to polarize the users as either experts or
non-experts.  There are those in between who want to make an informed
decision and will understand the verbiage.  The user who reported the
above bug is one such example.

> All we accomplish by changing the wording is to make everyone 
> read and deal with a longer and more complicated (and common!) 

No, making the warning verbose does not "make everyone read and deal
with it".  Those who ignore such warnings will continue to ignore it
just as easily even with a longer warning.

And the new wordings proposed so far are not even that long.

> prompt--which still does not completely and correctly inform the user.

But it conveys more information to the user than just saying "update all
links?"

> Does the new wording help the user to answer this obvious question:
> "Why would I not want to get all the latest external data?"

Ah, good point!  Let's explain why one would not want to update the
external links.

I can think of two reasons.  Sometimes the external contents are not
available, and trying to access such contents would end up messing up
with the current data cache.  Also, sometimes updating the external
contents may take a long time to complete, depending on the size of the
external data, and the speed of the network connection etc.

> The decision at hand is too complex for an accurate prompt, given the 
> way OOo uses links: links may point not only to external data, but also 
> to internal data, 

Links that point to internal data!?  Can you give us an example of how
the app links to an internal data?  I can't think of any such example,
and it's not supposed to include internal data as external links.

> which if you choose to update, may ruin your document 
> (mail merge output, for example). In this case, the improved wording 
> will be incorrect and misleading. 

But the current wording is even more misleading, terse, and *confusing*.

> In the end, to answer the prompt 
> correctly, OOo requires the user to have knowledge outside of what the 
> prompt text can possibly convey. 

You tend to have a perfectionist view, where unless it's perfect it's
not worth an improvement. ;-)

> The longer text may just make a poor 
> situation worse by forcing the user to deal with more verbiage.

I'm not sure if I agree.

> Would it be possible to have the prompt remain as it is, with a "Help" 
> or "More" button that leads to some expanded explanation?

Relying on help for everything is a recipe for making poor UI.  Help is
a last resort, and we need to do our best to design UI so that the user
won't have to rely on Help.  In some situations we do need to rely on
help to convey some complex scenarios to the user, but I don't think
updating external links is one such example.

One thing I may agree is that maybe we need to have a two-level warning
system that displays a summary of the warning, and the "Detail" button
to show more information.  But we don't have such dialog implemented yet
(feel free to correct me here), and until we do I would favor showing a
more verbose and informative warning message than the current terse
message that leaves some users confused and clueless.

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida@novell.com>