[instaviz-users] Fwd: Documentation???

[Brandon Fosdick]

Glen Low wrote:
> I wanted to make Instaviz a discoverable app. Both my 9 year-old 
> daughter and my wife picked it up within minutes and without too much 
> training. Obviously it needs documentation but I suspect it's primarily 
> for the harder-to-discover functions like delete and export and/or to 
> get past the initial shock of a blank screen -- then comes the question 
> of how to insert this help without complicating the interface.

This is a problem faced by all iPhone apps. Limited screen real estate 
makes it tough to find somewhere to put help text. Typically making a 
discoverable app is really the only way to go. But making that work is 
easier said than done. Developers need to follow some set of sane 
conventions and users need to know and understand those conventions.

Even in areas where Apple's apps and examples have provided clear 
guidelines to developers, users still have problems because the vast 
majority of them are new to the platform. The delete swipe is a good 
example. It's standard across every app that has a table view, yet users 
still ask how to delete things.

The platform is so young that we're still in the experimentation stage. 
So I think the only solution available right now is to experiment a bit, 
see what works, and wait for the world to evolve.