Explanatory guide text in Conductor?

Imre Farkas ifarkas at redhat.com
Thu Aug 9 08:08:30 UTC 2012


On 08/09/2012 01:42 AM, Tzu-Mainn Chen wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Matt Wagner" <matt.wagner at redhat.com>
>> To: aeolus-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 8, 2012 4:01:02 PM
>> Subject: Explanatory guide text in Conductor?
>>
>> 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
>>
>
> I like this idea, but in my opinion it should be generalized into a glossary/index of help items and topics; and an API that lets us create help links/popups that lead into the glossary.  Popups will help reduce clutter for expert users, and an overall help glossary will give a starting place for new users that might be confused.
>
> Mainn
>

I don't like the idea of linking to a different page for clarification 
and distracting the user from the goal he wants to achieve with redirects.

Jarda proposed in the Consistent forms wiki page to use simple_form for 
all our forms which would also make dead simple to help the user with 
inline labels and hints for every single input fields. With this and the 
summary above the form as it was proposed originally would create a 
really nice UX.

For advanced users we can provide a switch to turn off all help messages 
globally eg. on his profile page.

Imre



More information about the aeolus-devel mailing list