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intermine / bluegenes

A friendly next-generation interface for Genomic data discovery powered by InterMine
http://bluegenes.apps.intermine.org
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Create a tour for query builder #548

Open heralden opened 4 years ago

heralden commented 4 years ago

The query builder is pretty much the only page that's impossible to figure out unless someone walks you through it.

Here would be a useful place to have a tour/tutorial. If we end up creating a video tutorial for it, this can be achieved by simply having a big HELP, TUTORIAL or What is this? button which opens a modal with the video embedded.

sammyjava commented 4 years ago

We're thinking hard about tours for our hard-to-grok webapp Genomic Context Viewer, which is client-side, so we'll keep an eye on what you do for the Query Builder. @adf-ncgr

adf-ncgr commented 4 years ago

just a quick note from my side.

we've done tours so far (including for GCV) using http://bootstraptour.com/ but it seems to be not actively developed for a couple of years; a fork has been created that seems to be carrying on, at least with respect to some things that have gotten broken by changes to new versions of bootstrap itself; see the wonderfully named https://github.com/IGreatlyDislikeJavascript/bootstrap-tourist this issue: https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour/issues/729 explains why if you try to "Take the Tour" at https://legumeinfo.org/lis_context_viewer/instructions you will get tour steps with no apparent means to advance them (but you can use keystroke -> and <- to navigate). That seems to be the primary reason that IGreatlyDislikeJavascript created the fork.

I was not actually aware of the new fork when we started looking into switching over to https://introjs.com/ one of our main requirements is support for "multi-page tours" which these both do, although there is a greater difference in how they approach this than I was expecting.

Anyway, we are indeed interested in how tours can enable users to master the complexities of using powerful tools to pursue their own research questions, so we'll definitely be happy to discuss further when appropriate

heralden commented 4 years ago

Thank you for sharing these libs!

The query builder is probably simpler than the GCV, and it also only spans one page. We will probably start off with an embedded video tutorial, (if we manage to get a GSoD intern) but if we decide to create a tour IntroJS looks like a good candidate.

I think there is also more potential for tours in Bluegenes, like

so I think this medium can be explored further in the future.