Steinberg Help redesign now live

Lillie_Harris · June 17, 2024, 11:27am

Regular forum visitors might have picked up on hints about planned updates to how Steinberg delivers our documentation over the last… well, for a while now!

We’re very happy that a really substantial change to our Help portal is now live.

Please see this announcement post for more information:

With enormous thanks being due to my colleagues in the manuals team, and a lot of other people who have been working incredibly hard to make this happen.

Some of you have already started sharing your feedback and experiences – thank you very much for this.

There are a few remaining redirect issues that we are actively fixing, which should be resolved very shortly. Note also that Steinberg IDs are not connected to the new Help portal, so it’s expected that you cannot sign in there.

And do watch this space for further work to come on the new portal.

dspreadbury · June 18, 2024, 12:36pm

7 posts were split to a new topic: Pinned vs. unpinned topics on the forum

Alberto_Maria · June 17, 2024, 5:59pm

I tried to login with my credential (MySteinberg) to the official help site, but now way. What am I missing?

judddanby · June 17, 2024, 6:01pm

Martin_Rose · June 17, 2024, 6:06pm

If mysteinberg ID’s are not linked what is the sign in for?
There’s nowhere to make a new account?

Seems confusing

Alberto_Maria · June 17, 2024, 6:07pm

I saw that post Judd, but I didn’t understand that a connection with MySteinberg should be necessary; also because the help site is freely accessible by anyone from the public site without the need to be connected or logged in…

ChristinaK · June 18, 2024, 7:46am

Hi Martin,
the sign-in is for admins and publishers. steinberg.help is a public help portal, so there’s no need for an account as you will have access to every published document.

Martin_Rose · June 18, 2024, 7:59am

Thanks for the reply, but then surely the sign in should be on a hidden admins page not in the same public location as every other sign in within the ecosystem.
It’s small things like this that add confusion to a site that, given the current dual licensing system is already potentially really confusing for anyone new to Steinberg.
Maybe the sign in should be hidden if it’s not for public use?

Andro · June 18, 2024, 8:17am

@ChristinaK So why do I see a sign in button, that takes me to a page that causes me grief because it wont send you a password?

This is very poor UX design. Think of a way to make the sign in visible only to privileged users, via a backdoor admin access page for example. This is going to trip up users forever otherwise.

Not knowing what you say wasted hours of my time trying to work out how to get my password after having been logged out automatically.

People don’t like negative criticism on this forum, but this really is not good.

Others have made similar comments about this.

It is a natural reaction to sign in when presented with a sign in button.

Lillie_Harris · June 18, 2024, 8:23am

Thank you all for the feedback – it will be taken on board.

Mark_Johnson · June 18, 2024, 4:42pm

I just want to mention that I have used the new site twice since its introduction, and each time gotten much faster search results. A pleasure.

dspreadbury · June 19, 2024, 7:07am

8 posts were split to a new topic: New Steinberg.help site not working in Safari

Mike_999 · June 19, 2024, 3:05am

I agree. While some issues may still require work (which experience suggests will be promptly dealt with), my time testing the new manual format by looking up things I wasn’t quite sure of was fast, easy and pleasurable.

DSale · June 19, 2024, 1:04pm

Thanks for considering that the help needed some redesign. This is an interesting re-formatting but I have a small request: I was puzzled at first by the multiple entries for the same text from multiple manuals. The fact that you can choose to search only through the Dorico Pro manual is hidden and requires opening the dropdown menu and de-selecting all the other options. A choice similar to the version choice at the bottom of the menu with radio buttons would be more straight-forward and intuitive.

Also, is there any way to have a personalized filter setting saved so that you don’t have to go through all the same steps each time?

Thanks,
David

dspreadbury · June 19, 2024, 1:07pm

I’ll pass on my traditional tip, which is that I set up a custom search bookmark in my browser so that I can type “dh search term” into my browser’s address bar, and it will then perform a search on Steinberg.help directly in the Dorico 5.1 documentation. Here’s the URL you can use:

https://steinberg.help/search/all?query=%s&filters=product_names_smtg~%2522Dorico%257CDorico+Pro%2522*version_numbers_smtg~%25225.1%2522&content-lang=en-US

The %s portion gets substituted automatically by the browser by whatever you type following your chosen shortcut or keyword (which in my case is “dh”, short for “Dorico Help”).

Andro · June 19, 2024, 2:34pm

@dspreadbury that’s just dreadful, sorry. You can’t be serious. Such a hack for an issue that should be designed better. I nearly choked on my cup of tea.

Others may be joyous over a DITA output website, but I am having a terrible time. First, as others have said, it’s hard to go direct to the manual you want, and then it displays hundreds of hits from all different manuals when I have not even entered any search terms. It’s possible I have simply lost the plot and my mind has gone awol, or it is possibly the redesign. And I really don’t like the sign in button which caused a whole day of trying to work out why I was logged out and why I could not get a password reset link sent, waiting and checking in vain for hours. When you see a sign in button you will naturally click it to sign in. Please put this on an inaccessible admin back door entrance, if that is what it is for. And its not at all obvious that this is intended to be a site fully open to the public and people who have not bought Dorico.

I have a strong feeling the change was not beta tested with we users. All the archive links were not working in Australia (although this now appears to be fixed) and this caused me a lot of wasted time as well. If you want beta testers in the future, call me!

I’m sorry to be the official forum Curmudgeon, but for me this is an appalling regressive change to a website that was working perfectly and at least for me, easy to use.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to see all these items when a) I have to scroll down and b) I have not typed in any search terms.

Alberto_Maria · June 19, 2024, 2:40pm

@Andro , presently the most direct way to go where you want is this:

the Help site https://steinberg.help/
Archive https://archive.steinberg.help/ (you can go directly here)…
All is as before. You can select your family and go on!
I just hope that in Archive also the most recent docs will be always present
I also hope that https://docs.steinberg.help will be redirected to 1, or 2.!

Andro · June 19, 2024, 2:41pm

And here’s what I get for Cubase which I own, 2627 results with no search term entered.

Perhaps I am wired wrongly, but that makes no UX sense to me. Shouldn’t that be zero results?

dspreadbury · June 19, 2024, 2:50pm

I’ve always used that kind of search bookmark, for many years, because I find it very convenient. It has long been my way of solving the problem with the previous site that using a generic search engine would return results for versions other than the one I’m looking for, a problem which at least now has a straightforward solution in the new site. When I post a link to a particular page in the manual here on the forum, I have invariably found it by searching for it using that search bookmark. You might want to try it rather than dismiss it out of hand!

The previous site was also powered by DITA, by the way, so let’s leave that aside: Lillie happened to mention that the documentation is written using DITA, but that’s always been true, and is immaterial.

For what it’s worth, in my personal opinion the new site doesn’t make it simple enough to browse directly to the manual for a particular version of a specific product, and I’ve of course passed this on to the manuals team. I also of course passed on my opinion that it would be preferable to hide the “sign in” link, since it offers no utility to end users (you might notice that the link is now labeled as “admin sign in”, which hopefully makes it somewhat clearer in purpose, though ideally I think it should be hidden altogether for us mere mortals who are not administrators of the site). You can rest assured that the team is well aware of the things that are imperfect about the new site.

The new site is built on a platform provided by a third party, and we have been working closely with them on the integration. Some of the things that we would ideally like to have will require additional work from the platform provider, so we will be subject to their own plans and resources as well. But you can rest assured that we will make further changes and improvements in response to feedback.

Incidentally, for me at least, if I visit the steinberg.help home page, on the right-hand side under Popular I see direct links to the front page of the Dorico Pro and Cubase Pro operation manuals:

You can save bookmarks to these pages as well.

I’m still considering exactly what we should do with the link to the manual from the Help menu in Dorico itself. With the former site, it could go to a single page that included links to all of the various manuals and ancillary documentation for the current version, but there’s currently no good equivalent for that page in the new site, which isn’t ideal. However, you should find that all of the new help buttons in dialogs and in the main window itself all still go to the appropriate place in the manual, allowing you to navigate on from there.