Explanatory guide text in Conductor?

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Aug 8 20:01:02 UTC 2012


Hi folks,

I've had an idea in the back of my mind for a while, and thought I'd
mention it here to see if it was actually a good idea or not.

A lot of web apps, especially the ones that are user-friendly, tend to
include text at the top of the main content section of each page walking
you through what you're expected to do on the page. After you upload a
photo to a social site, you might get a message along the lines of,
"Great photo, $user! Now, you can tag your friends in the photo, or add
a caption below!"

In that case, it's probably semi-intuitive what you're expected to do,
but the text at the top of the page makes it abundantly clear if you
weren't sure.

Aeolus does something pretty complicated, and a user must step through a
bunch of forms as they build an image, create a deployable, and go to
launch it. We've talked about working on making the flow intuitive and
the forms easy-to-understand, but I wonder if it might also be nice to
have some text guiding the user along.

As a random example, here is what the "New Deployable" page looks like
today:
http://dvmw6cjgjm3k7.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Screenshot-at-2012-08-08-142841.png

It's not necessarily a complicated form, but if you stop someone on the
street and ask them what it's all about, they're going to have no clue.

I took a really rough stab at writing some text at the top of the page:
http://dvmw6cjgjm3k7.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Screenshot-at-2012-08-08-150224.png

The text probably needs some work, and we should probably have a link or
something like that to explain _what_ a "Deployable XML file" is and how
to create one. But I like the idea of having some text telling me what
I'm doing on the page, and what will happen next.

Ignoring my mediocre example text and the fact that it's just an
unstyled paragraph tag, I wonder what people think about this general
concept. Would it be helpful? Or in an app like ours, do we expect the
user to know what they're doing? (Unlike, say, sharing a photo with some
friends, managing cloud deployments isn't necessarily you should learn
on the fly.)

-- Matt



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