When within JIRA and looking for help, the entirety of the help dialog only leads one to confluence.atlassian.com with docs for the requested software.
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However, searchability is restricted to documentation so when someone wants to find how to do something that is not covered in the docs, which happens a lot, searching for it often yields poor results.
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Then there is a place there to ask the Community, and so we're prompted to CREATE the request on the next page...
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BUT, when you get to that page if you remember to quit what you started, and FIRST search there also, you are far more likely to get your answer. But it's not intuitive to think you'd have to search in both places redundantly. So twice now (and yes we're new) I've searched for a solution using this very path, not found what I was after, posted a request, only then to, on a whim, research in the new place where I found myself posting, and found my answer... you can see how easy this is to happen and I'd be surprised if it didn't happen a lot.
So now I have two posts out there that I was able to answer myself, except that the path to the answer was:
- Look in docs
- Get prompted to post a request
- post request
- realize I'm in a new place
- search there
- find my answer
- learn my post was for nothing.
Seems if the searches were combined in any way - OR - the "Have a question about this article" dialog FIRST searched the community for results that were not found in the docs, then steps 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 could have been avoided.
This seems a fairly big hole in the self help process, which is why I spent some time reporting it. I hope this helps.
