I don't like the way posts on forums appear on my board - long lines of difficult to read text.

I battle to get html to work on them and battle even more to find any relevant documentation.
IPS would make a fortune if they employed 1 person to write a comprehensive user-friendly guide for your products. There should be a set of templates which you can choose eg: forums with post-width set to 550px (for example so its more like a blog instead of apparently having no control over appearance)

It may be obvious to you as to how to use html in posts but where is a clear how-to guide, step by step for dummies? There are more non-technical users than technical users and you are ignoring what would be your biggest market by not getting serious about being user-friendly.

Look at how easy it is to have a good-looking post in blogger, or wordpress, or how easy it is to use WindowsLive Writer to post to blogs.
Look at the user-friendly products created by many other companies that keep the non-technical user in mind.

IPS are a sound and helpful company but seem to be shooting themselves in both feet by not working seriously on making their products easy to use by everybody.
The salary of one extra member of staff who would specialise in this one area would pay for itself a thousand times.

I am an IPS fan but cannot understand why this important area seems to be ignored

What's Stopping You?

ps: if you don't believe in gremlins with a sense of humour, I can't even get the justification of this post correct...

They have loads of documentation. Just not in a downloadable PDF format.

They have loads of documentation. Just not in a downloadable PDF format.

Indeed.

http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/documentation/index.html/_/documentation/

It's kinda spread all over the place really. That is the main repository, but they also have a KB, and articles. It can be a chore just finding it all. Not to mention there can be big holes in the info itself.

Yes, they have documentation, but there is room for improvement. :)

Totally agree. See from October 2010.


In that topic, to improve usability of the documentation, I suggest:

In the usability design biz, what we do first is define user profiles. I suggest there are three users for a Getting Started Guide: 1) someone who has no experience with administration of forum software, 2) someone who has moderate experience, 3) someone who has advanced experience. Definitions of the ACP controls could be a searchable appendix.

For the first user, you would provide the basic steps to setting up a site. From my experience, I would suggest 1) setting up forums and topics, 2) setting up the member matrix, 3) setting up the member registration process, 4) installing a skin, 5) installing a logo.

PS I hope there's a skin that simplifies and condenses this interface. As a usability designer, I never expected to say this: the default skin has too much white space, too many borders, and too many rows of controls. Reading a page requires too much scrolling for my purpose.



BTW, I've been a usability designer and information architect since 1999.

...

It may be obvious to you as to how to use html in posts but where is a clear how-to guide, step by step for dummies? There are more non-technical users than technical users and you are ignoring what would be your biggest market by not getting serious about being user-friendly.

Look at how easy it is to have a good-looking post in blogger, or wordpress, or how easy it is to use WindowsLive Writer to post to blogs.

Look at the user-friendly products created by many other companies that keep the non-technical user in mind.

IPS are a sound and helpful company but seem to be shooting themselves in both feet by not working seriously on making their products easy to use by everybody.

The salary of one extra member of staff who would specialise in this one area would pay for itself a thousand times.

I am an IPS fan but cannot understand why this important area seems to be ignored

What's Stopping You?...

Excellent point. IPB has such great potential, but it has not advanced to the stage of thinking of its customers as people with different aptitudes and interests than the people who are developing the product.

In other words, the administration view and documentation are designed by developers for developers, or at least people with extensive forum administration experience.

Because ordinary people might use the forums, the user view is at least competitive in usability.

It would advance IPB WAY beyond the competition if the administration view and documentation were tailored to non-developers and newbie admins.

And I'm saying this even though IBP 3.2 is a giant step forward -- the admin view is so much better usability-wise than whatever was there last October! I was about to give up and go to free bbs software. But the documentation still has a long way to go.

In other words, the administration view and documentation are designed by developers for developers, or at least people with extensive forum administration experience.

Developer documentation is the only documentation written by developers, fyi. All other documentation articles are specifically written by tech support and customer support representatives, and specifically to prevent the "by developer" view. Note that at the bottom of all documentation pages there is a link "Did this help" that you can use to provide feedback on specific documentation if it is unclear, invalid, incorrect, etc. which we invite you to make use of anytime you have problems with specific documentation.

Setting that aside, Charles has plans to improve documentation in the coming months.

Developer documentation is the only documentation written by developers, fyi. All other documentation articles are specifically written by tech support and customer support representatives, and specifically to prevent the "by developer" view....

This may be so. Still, the documentation is written from a point of view that assumes more technical knowledge than a non-developer would have. This often happens when the writers are so immersed in an application they would not be able to tell what it looks like to naive eyes.

Note that at the bottom of all documentation pages there is a link "Did this help" that you can use to provide feedback on specific documentation if it is unclear, invalid, incorrect, etc. which we invite you to make use of anytime you have problems with specific documentation....

Unfortunately, this feedback loop doesn't work when there's an absence of documentation.

I presume if a chunk of documentation gets a negative response, it's reviewed? How would the reviewer know what the problem is?

Setting that aside, Charles has plans to improve documentation in the coming months.

I look forward to seeing that.

The support folks must get pretty tired answering the same basic questions over and over.

Here I am less than a year after posting in frustration about the scarcity of documentation or user-friendliness for mere mortals like myself..

I have to say that although there are still gaps, the IPB guys have put a lot of hard work into this and I do feel they are taking the non-techies like myself seriously

I am sure this will be paying them good dividends in earning them new non-tech savvy customers - they have a winner here, and it seems they are making great strides in ensuring it is genuinely user -friendly. So - thank you guys for that..

One thing I can't complain about is their support, which has always been excellent.

As I've said many times before, if you do not have technical knowledge about how your web site runs. Take the time to learn yourself, it may take time but it in the long run it will help you a lot and prevent some support tickets. 7 years ago I knew nothing about Linux, now Im one of the people who make sure over 910 of them stay up, and diagnose problems, and this is for what I would consider the most prominent software company in the world.. Well a division of it that was bought many years ago.

The same goes for the site I run/co-run (that is once the other admin decids what he wants to do with it) I knew how to install it, as I read the directions. I was never really involved much with it at first but I learned all the functions in the ACP, as more features were added and the UI improved (I started at 1.x after IPS started charging for the software which was fine) I have a perpetual license, I just have no idea what account its under (lol) but Im not about to dig for it as I don't need it and already have two licenses (one of which I also have no use for). The point is, take the time to learn. You won't need to rely on the documentation as much, and if something your looking for is missing support should have no problem helping you with it and passing it along to get that added to the articles.

I would personally like to see a collection of error code translations how ever ;)

I would personally like to see a collection of error code translations how ever :wink:

http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/documentation/ips_error_codes.html/_/invision-power-board-3xx

However, it is somewhat out of date.

It does seem to be missing random error codes in the lower digits as well, at least based on some of the topics i've seen.


Although there is formatting issues with the page numbers and next/previous page links.. They are squished together and page numbers go down not across. IE9 and Chrome 16.x

That page was built when IP.Board 3.0 was released roughly. So, yes, it's out of date.