I then replied - my second mistake, I guess - that apparently to Unix people, "user friendly" means "comes with more documentation than you'd ever want to read". I am sorry for ranting a little here, but the state of Microsoft's documentation is very disappointing in light of the resources they have when I was a Linux newbie and made the mistake of asking a stupid question on a discussion board, I got flamed rather hard about not having read the documentation. I don't think it is hard to do per se, just very tedious, but Microsoft certainly has the resources to do it if management makes it a priority. FreeBSD has a great manual, too, and last time I looked, the JDK also came with very good - and well-organized - documentation. And that's just the first example I can think of off the top of my hat. This is an example of the standard Microsoft should aim for. Also, I can download the whole thing as a PDF for offline reading (or printing if I wanted to). With Postgres, I don't need to search, I can (nearly always) find what I need by scanning the table of contents by eyeball. It's not just the builtin search, the way the content is organized always seem be out of line with the way my brain works.Īs a reference, take a look at (if you're not familiar with it already) at PostgreSQL's manual. I hope this helps give some context on the decision and thanks for the feedback. The reason we called this out is that the previous architecture doesn't not even have this as a capability. We will also provide the option for customers to have all content together versus having content broken into separate pieces and made available for offline. In some cases, it's fine to have one long article. It's about thinking about the right level of content for the task our customers are going through. When you are just starting off, "Hello World" is a lot better than War & Peace. ![]() We'd get feedback that many of our competitors have a much simpler "Getting Started" tutorial, while ours would be much longer and we'd get feedback that it seems more complex or overwhelming. Another key reason is not all content is built the same. Instead of doing that, we would break the article into pieces by language. For developers, we face the same problem where some articles include multiple langauges and code samples are duplicated. For SEO, it's also much more likely that they'll find the solution by Googling (with or without Bing) to something like "Setup Intune Android" and go directly to the page that takes care of just that task. If an admin who's company has standardized on Android, they want just the Android content, they don't want to have to sift through iOS/Windows troubleshooting to get to the Android setup content. A good example here is that instead of having separate articles on how to setup iOS, Android and Windows phone devices with Intune, the previous articles had that as part of a much later article. Depending on the article (see point #2) very few people read from beginning to end. A good example on why - For our documentation we clearly saw customers jumping around content trying to find the part of the article that helps them. Thanks for the feedback, and we went through a lot of customer feedback already on this. Maybe it's the result of some stupid "engagement" metric that awards clicking around? That's completely counter to the point of documentation it's not supposed to require much interaction, it's supposed to be something you passively read while doing whatever it is you need to with the information you've consumed. ![]() I have the same gripe with some other sites that love click-toggling sections (especially when there is no "expand all" button, or expanding one collapses the others, or even worse - they default to collapsed without JS.) You'll eventually get to see all the same content, but you have to spend more clicks (and possibly scroll) to get to the part you want instead of just scrolling. You see the same amount of content at once regardless of whether it's been paged, unless your browser window is ridiculously large or the content has been literally split into paragraph-per-page levels of fragmentation. This makes no sense at all, even if you think people's attention spans have shortened. ![]() Can be overwhelming because of its length
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