Forum (2017) - link to www.zero88.com

[kgallen]

I can't post in "News and Announcements" so have to start a topic here.

We used to be able to get back to the main Zero88 site from the Forum. There doesn't seem to be a click zone to do that now. OK, so I just edit off the "/forum" bit in the URL but that is a bit of a drag because I have to wake my fingers up.

When I'm helping other users on your behalf  (*) it can be necessary to go back to the main site to provide a link for documentation/software/related products etc so making this easy helps us help you  if you are able to add this.

Thanks, Kevin

 

* Yes I know the Forum is there for users to help users and is not there just for Zero88 to answer questions, but you get my drift . I'm a resource not on the payroll...!

[Jon Hole]

[kgallen]

Nice one!

Bet it took you longer to find that graphic than add the tab!

Thanks Jon!

[iank99]

No it didn't - I bet he keeps a few on his hard drive for such occasions 

[kgallen]

(On which note, Jon's graphic is not being displayed this morning - seemed to be showing ok last night...). Admittedly I'm on my work laptop this morning and last night on my home PC. But both Win10 and Chrome browser. 

ETA: Hmmm, rendering ok at home still...! Weird. Maybe a firewall at work...

[Jon Hole]

On 11/17/2017 at 10:05 AM, iank99 said:

I bet he keeps a few on his hard drive for such occasions 

My what?! Everything's saved on the cloud* now Ian!

 

*(by "saved", I mean "searched". And by "cloud", I mean "Google").

[kgallen]

Hi Jon,

If you still have your genie in a bottle (no, not you Edward!), any chance you could duplicate that zero88.com tab you added and rename it "Knowledgebase" with a link to http://support.zero88.com/ 😉

I know... always wanting more..

Thanks!

Kevin

[Jon Hole]

[kgallen]

Ha ha ha, that's excellent - the graphic and the new tab 👍 !

[iank99]

I see Jon's multi-tasking as ever... Serving Ice creams in Edingburgh, console training and maintaining the forum 😉

[kgallen]

The Forum has lost the list of "Logged on users" and "Staff".

How can I spy on you now, hey? Oh, that was the reason you removed them...😁

 

(ps Jon, your Genie graphic has disappeared. Has the cat eaten him?)

(pps Where is my ice cream?)

[Jon Hole]

49 minutes ago, kgallen said:

The Forum has lost the list of "Logged on users" and "Staff".

How can I spy on you now, hey? Oh, that was the reason you removed them...😁

I never really understood the point of those, but if you must continue your secretive detective habits, you can access them here and here!

 

52 minutes ago, kgallen said:

(ps Jon, your Genie graphic has disappeared. Has the cat eaten him?)

It was a direct link... are you on a corporate network? It might be blocked. I've embedded the image for future perusers (is that a word?) to enjoy 🙂

[kgallen]

27 minutes ago, Jon Hole said:

I never really understood the point of those, but if you must continue your secretive detective habits, you can access them here and here!

Yes, I know what you mean! I have used them in the past to see if the poster of a new topic was still online to give a quick response if they are stuck/in a hurry, and then follow up with a longer answer.

27 minutes ago, Jon Hole said:

It was a direct link... are you on a corporate network? It might be blocked. I've embedded the image for future perusers (is that a word?) to enjoy 🙂

He's back! Yes a corporate network at the moment... has been a problem in the past, you're right! Thanks!

[kgallen]

I was looking at the Knowledgebase for articles and I notice the Orb and Orb XF are not mentioned any more - not in the "Consoles" list and neither the "Legacy Consoles" list. Have they gotten lost in a page reorg?

I was looking for Orb/XF because there used to be more (ZerOS) articles listed there - maybe they've all been ported over to FLX now? - (in which case I'll just look at the list under FLX, which is what I want anyway!).

 

Having written this I just wonder if there is real benefit maintaining different "current product" and "legacy product" threads in the Knowledgebase - just means folks have to hunt around more - I know I struggled to find AlphaPack2 when looking a few months back - ok I had problems with the search then too (I did raise a Forum post somewhere - oh, here:

).

[Edward Z88]

Hi Kevin,

ORB XF now comes under the "Legacy ZerOS" section of the Knowledgebase...

http://support.zero88.com/Legacy-products/Legacy-Consoles/Legacy-ZerOS/

Hopefully now that the search engine has had some time to realise how people are wording questions and what they are after, you will start to find it is more effective.

Edward

[kgallen]

1 hour ago, kgallen said:

I just wonder if there is real benefit maintaining different "current product" and "legacy product" threads in the Knowledgebase - just means folks have to hunt around more

 

30 minutes ago, Edward- Z88 said:

ORB XF now comes under the "Legacy ZerOS" section of the Knowledgebase...

Touche! 😆

[kgallen]

Sorry to bang on about this again...

I really think you should flatten the hierarchy of the Knowledgebase and definately remove the separation of Legacy products from current and put into a single product type. i.e. put ALL lighting consoles from the birth of Christ to current day under a single Consoles listing. Put the software there too. I'm a Zero88 die-hard and I know what is current product and what is legacy and I still have to hunt around the Knowledgebase to find what I'm looking for - and I KNOW what I'm looking for and that it exists.

If I go Legacy Products , your most popular product to date (I suspect), the Frog series, is not even listed under the Legacy Console heading! It's there when you push down again into Legacy Consoles page if you haven't already given up looking or didn't realise the heading was a link.

I was just helping a BlueRoom member with Fat Frog and I wanted to provide some links to manuals/software etc. This was TOO HARD! That non-Zero88-born-and-bred would have no chance. He doesn't know if Fat Frog is current or legacy - and he doesn't care - or that the manual is quite out of date or that the latest software should be 10.12 and the release notes are full of really essential information. He would give up and go back to BR and moan about "how bad and unusable" Zero88 products are and they don't do what he needs or what the manual says so the software must be full of bugs etc etc. We don't want that of course, because we know that is not true!!!

What I'm saying is the organisation of the Knowledgebase is not good for a USER even if the partitioning works wonderfully for you Zero88 chaps. Simplify it so a novice user can go Consoles -> Fat Frog (for example) and be there with everything he needs. All Consoles -> [null/Fat/Bull/Leap/Mambo] Frog [Box] links would go to the same Frog page with everything on it. Same for Jester, Solution, ORB, FLX ranges (and then console links to ZerOS likewise). But -> you do need to clarify Leap products at that page level because of the Frog/ZerOS variant confusion, viz Consoles -> Leap Frog (green) and Consoles -> Leap Frog 48/96 (blue) [or whatever it is!].

Hiding the "old stuff" isn't going to make people buy a new product from you, if anything it will drive them away.

Please please please please please!

Edit: Also can you put the darn manuals on the KB. It should be there, at the top on the page for the console. Just linked one for the FLX S. Is it on the KB, no. Is it on the Consoles splash screen, no (just the Quick Start). Is it on the bottom FLX S page? Yes, thank f* for that! 

 

[Edward Z88]

Hi Kevin,

Apologies for my delay in replying.

We agree, there are changes that need to be made, and we're planning the best way to make these changes. Currently, it is very much aimed at search, not necessarily navigating the site map.

Rather than having an entirely separate "Legacy" section, how about under each Product Type, there is a specific Legacy section for that product type. Then instantly end users will understand if their product isn't listed, it must now be legacy.

FLX S manuals have been added to the FLX S article...

http://support.zero88.com/995795451

Hope this helps,

Edward

[kgallen]

32 minutes ago, Edward- Z88 said:

Rather than having an entirely separate "Legacy" section, how about under each Product Type, there is a specific Legacy section for that product type. Then instantly end users will understand if their product isn't listed, it must now be legacy.

No, just have an alphabetical list. I don't want to hunt around for Fat Frog, I just want to see it there in the list in front of me. Zero88 haven't made that many consoles (or dimmers, or whatever), it won't be hundreds of lines long. Users don't know or care about current/legacy (that's just the way developers see things not users), they just want an answer. To them, the box sitting in front of them is current.

These days I find lots of websites have lots of hierarchy. The page makers love the partitioning. But as a user, trying to use the pages and find what you want is a pain, because the user's view of the world is often not the same as the product developer (as an aside I see this in more recent product manuals - they are laid out in the way the product developer thinks, not in the way the user needs to find and access information). I don't think relying on search functions is good. They are frustrating - you have to find a suitable term (that is hard) and then you have to filter through the results which could be too few if the search bind is strong or too many if the bind is weak. The KB is not that large (unfortunately), search should not be the main mechanism to use it in my view.

Per product page, I think you should start by creating a clear list of what should be on the top page for every product. Let's say:

1. Official Product Name - bold and underlined.
2. Production date range - this gives the "legacy" information - the user can see it's not currently manufactured - but they are unlikely to care, they just want support.
3. Optional item - any clarification needed to identify the product or variants - Put you LeapFrog disambiguation here and link to the relevant page for that product.
4. A picture of the product!
5. Cross-links to pages for other products in that family
6. Link to latest manual - and the publish date - maybe a note to say what the latest software version is this covers.
7. Link to latest software - and the publish date
8. Link to latest release notes - I like the latest Frog release notes because they are all in the one document in reverse chronological order. And they read nicely, not just a table with one terse line from your bug database. And spell checked. The redline markup you use for FLX RNs is useful too.

Then the Application Notes or articles - subdivided with subject headings or white space, but not hierarchy because the user then has to hunt through the linked pages to find the article because it's guaranteed you'd put it under a different section to where they'd expect. It would be ok to create a common sub-page for all ZerOS application notes (then point to that from ZerOS, FLX, Solution, Orb etc) and likewise for the Frog range (being careful to disambiguate Frog2...). Actually it would help you a lot if you created core pages once so it's easy for you to update and you don't forget to add the new thing here, there and everywhere.

Please don't embed links in headings - it took me a while to realise name headings were links to lower pages.

Making this page SmartPhone friendly would be really useful for when the user is on-site with a problem. Keeping the page flat is REALLY useful here - the signal is barely 3G where I often work, so not having to keep pushing and popping pages makes a big difference. Not all venues are in the middle of big cities with strong 4G coverage!

Keep it simple. For you to update and the user to find stuff. Without the search.

Sorry I appear to have waffled on again quite a bit... but hope it helps... a bit...!

Kevin

[kgallen]

Hi Edward,

This recent post is a perfect example:

The ORB article is exactly what was needed. You knew it existed, so you found it.

I was looking for something along those lines and found nothing - fortunately you came along quickly and helped Harry out. I ended up on this page, which gave me nothing of use:

http://support.zero88.com/Legacy-products/Legacy-Consoles/Legacy-ZerOS/975362971/ORB.htm

The link you found should have been on the Orb page I ended up at. Neither do I find your article on the Orb XF page. (I found it on Orb XF now I looked again knowing the title).