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CUAHSI / HydroDesktop

HydroDesktop is a free and open source GIS enabled desktop application that helps you search for, download, visualize, and analyze hydrologic and climate data registered with the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System. HydroDesktop is part of the legacy CUAHSI toolkit and is not under active development. Click the "releases" link below to download the latest installer for Microsoft Windows.
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Implement "Take a Tour" for beginners #109

Open xhqiao89 opened 7 years ago

xhqiao89 commented 7 years ago

twhitvine[CodePlex]
What if... The first time someone installed and used HydroDesktop, a window would pop up offering to take the user on a tour of the software. The tour should include search. So for example, for search, the dialog would say, quotYou can search for data within a certain area by zooming in to that area. Click the zoom tool and then click in the map to draw a box around the county that you live in.quot

Once the user has zoomed in, the dialog would say, quotGreat! Now tell us what variable you want to search for by typing it in the keyword box in the ribbon.quot

The idea is to guide novice users on the basics of using the software in a step-by-step interactive manner. Otherwise, when users open HydroDesktop for the first time, they might not know what to do next.

This is inspired by quottake a tourquot tutorials that I've seen online. The only one I can think of currently is the new Google Maps, for which you have to receive an invite to use (as of this writing), but I took a short video of their Take a Tour and posted it here. http://screencast.com/t/pXV9uLmVg

Note that I'm not an expert on how Take a Tour should be written. This issue is not meant to prescribe the tour and wording I've used in the example above, but rather to suggest that HydroDesktop include some kind of Take a Tour functionality to help new users get started. Oh, and there should be a quotDon't Show This Againquot check box. Maybe Take a Tour can be a button on the Help tab in case users click to not show it again but decide they need to see it again.

xhqiao89 commented 7 years ago

cuylerfris[CodePlex]
marking as active

xhqiao89 commented 7 years ago

katmckee[CodePlex]
This is a great idea! It should be guidance for the user as he/she is doing a real search with real data, not a tour in the sense of using fake data... So having a tour guide throughout the steps of mapping and searching for data, and user has the option to turn it off a subsequent time that you come into HydroDesktop.