Shorten Story Length
There were a lot of questions in the story template. Responding to all of them seemed redundant and made the stories very long. This problem was two fold, as a contributor it made it difficult and as a reader it was even more difficult. There was a lot of stuff buried in the stories and I didn’t always have time to sift through and grab the kernels. I would have preferred to have the story shorter with the option of clicking for more details. It was easy for the essence of the story to get lost in the detail. As a reader, I would prefer to control how much of the detail I read.
Rather than shorten story length I would advise to have an executive summary that draw the "lesson" in a limited number of lines. The title and exceutive summary could then be use to search, filter and sort and/or to do summer list.
- Log in to post comments
Very much agree with this. I'm glad I searched before posting it myself. I find the template not just long, but also a bit awkward. I feel like it's not necessary to force things into a specific format. It might have made a lot of sense to the people who came up with it - and it might work great for some stories, but as a general purpose thing I would suggest we just have title, summary, and story. Then you can have guidelines posted that indicate what kinds of things people find most helpful to have included in the story.
- Log in to post comments
Hi Sam and Susan, thanks for your comments. Can you tell us what aspects of the templates you find most redundant? thanks...
Michele
- Log in to post comments
Hi Michele - sorry I just saw this comment. For me, it's the "Story" template. It's not necessarily redundant, but I find that the number of fields and the description of the fields can make it hard to shoe horn some stories into. I think it's good to have a guideline about how to structure an effective story, but I think forcing it with fields in the template is a little constricting. Actually I find it a little ironic - it's like having too much management structure :)
I actually do knowledge management and content management as part of my role at Red Hat and we've learned this lesson several times over. In some cases, having a template with specific sections is helpful, but sometimes it's un-necessary overhead. When you do have a template, I think it's good to get input from users on how the fields should be set up, which are really necessary, what is the reasoning behind each one, etc.
- Log in to post comments
You need to register in order to submit a comment.