Integrated learning

From a professional view I am interested in how people can be educated and how translation plays a role.

Personally I think most software translations are really bad, so I always use english versions. But if you work for a japanese firm ...

The biggest problem is that semantics and context are missing with the strings, and you need to be a bit if a subject matter expert to be able to understand and translate jargon.

But even if the transkation is ok, it's still a short abstract description that needs interpretation by the user.

That's were help is needed.

In MuseScore strings in transifex it is not absolutely clear when something is a command/selection or helptext.

I assume stringd with a lot of capitalised words are commands, and those without are the help texts.

Most of the time they are exactly the same though, except for the capitals.

This is a help like: say it again, maybe he will understand the second time. This is what I call zero help.

Often you see help like 'if you press the butgon, it will do 'literal buttontextstring'. I am pleased that MuseScore does not have this kind of help strings. This kind of help explains hiw a button works... not what function it has. This us what I call little help.

The next level of help is where the function is really explained with more text. This is what i call functional help. MuseScore has no such help in the balloons. That's where the manual is needed. But there is no contextual link from the sw into the right place in the manual, so you have to search yourself.

The ultimate level of help though is what I call application help.
Did you ever think reading a manual "that's a nice function, but why the hell should I switch it off then?" or "when or why should I use this?". That's where the application help tells youbwhen to use it and when not.

So, my conclusion is that the help strings inside the program might as well be deleted now.

Or change them into more usefull strings.

Or:

A lot of settings appear in the templates. So this is a nice place to get an overview of all the possibilities.

I would recommend to add all settings here that appear in the inspector only. Because these are not intended to be changed as a template, grey them out. But adding them gives s nicer overview!

Then: pics or it won't happen!

For each element, draw the default appearance, and fir each setting show an example of what is influenced.
For examle the default barline thickness, a thinner and a thicker line. (I don't ask a reactive preview, just some pics, or one pic with three states).

For the greyed out elements you can also show static pics here.
How does a circled decrescendo tip look like?

This is a multilingual solution and especially for style editing much more helping than whatever abstract help text.

If all the help pics get the same standarised size, the menus and tabs will stay structured.

This is "integrated help" which makes the program better "learnable".

I introduced the term "learnability" in our industrial design dept. at R&DD as a follow up for the old fashiobed "usability" which relates to things you should gave seen before (which should gave created the "intuition").

Qbffqs.