MACROMEDIA.COM: SUPPORT PAGES

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13 2004 @ 11:20 AM

The people involved in the development of the current Macromedia.com have had a great deal of success producing an engaging experience, using a balanced mix of Macromedia's technologies to show the world what their products can do. However, and despite some skewed reviews like the one pointed out by CFGigolo in this blog post (in portuguese), there are still things that need to be improved.

I don't know about you, but sometimes I would use Google instead of diving into Macromedia's collections of Technotes. I usually will end up in a Technote, but saving the time (and confusion) of attempting to use the Technotes index and search. This is specially true for ColdFusion related documents; there are many orphan Technotes, meaning that you won't find them in the Coldfusion Technotes index. Funny thing, the Flash Technotes index is buried in the site, and is not accessible from the Flash Support homepage (or I just couldn't find the link).

The other big problem with the Technotes is their organization. Why are they divided by subject instead of product version? When you need information, it is about a particular version of the product, that's for sure.

I have to second CFGigolo when he says that one would think Harley Manning, the author of that report for Forrester, "never needed to use Macromedia's support pages".

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JOHN DOWDELL

JANUARY 13 2004 @ 05:03 PM

fwiw, the Google engine is used internally on the Macromedia site. I don't know if it keeps separate records from the main Google site, but the searching should be about the same.

(Sometimes I go to the Macromedia site and type an entry there, but with the way my browsers are set up sometimes it's just faster to type "site:macromedia.com" and use the main Google engine. Terms like "inurl:dreamweaver" or "-forums" also help in restricting a search through either access point.)

Navigation hierarchies will always be an issue... one path is to divide things by when documents were written, as you describe... on the support pages they chose to categorize them by topic so you could compare related documents quickly... multiple nav paths are probably most useful but risk confusing the first-time visitor still further, so it's hard all the way around.... :(

(I see "Technote Index" listed on the main Flash Support Center page, and so am not sure what you're experiencing, sorry.)

If you've got alternate technote navigation systems to propose, then you can reach support infrastructure staff directly through that "Web Survey" linked at page-bottom:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/survey/web_survey.html

tx, jd/mm

OSCAR TRELLES

JANUARY 13 2004 @ 06:23 PM

Thanks for the feedback John. I might have missed the link to the Flash Technotes index, but I'm sure there are orphan documents, meaning that they're not listed on the Technotes indexes. I think we are talking about the same regarding your first parenthesized (is that a word?) paragraph.

quote:
"(..) multiple nav paths are probably most useful but risk confusing the first-time visitor still further, so it's hard all the way around.."

I have to disagree. I'm sure people browsing technotes have had enough exposure to UIs to understand and use standard navigation systems. In fact, offering multiple options to navigate through data is the basis for true usability. In this particular case, there's no need for complication, it could be as simple as having a few columns for 'title', 'product version', 'topic', and even 'id', though it really doesn't tell anything to me :) Then just have the ability to sort the collection using those columns data.

Oh well, I'll follow the survey, and hope it will encourage others to do so as well.