Guided Tutorial Extension Proposal #1

[vmassol]

@gabrielc

Going forward, I’m going to make smaller, more focused proposals, and when consensus is reached on the Forum, add that information to a Design page. The Design page is going to be the main source of truth when it comes to the Guided Tutorial extension.

Great, thx for working on this Gabriel!

@gabrielc

This proposal is a continuation of what I’ve previously referred to as the “Checklist Extension”. I realized that a “Checklist” extension already exists, so I decided to be a little more specific with the name.

+1 for a new name (but not because there’s already an extensions - which IMO we should remove as there’s no doc for it) but because a checklist extension can be a lot of things and thus the name is not precise enough.

Now re the new name, we could also name it “Guided Tour” which IMO is a bit more precise than “Guided Tutorial” (which could still be about a lot of things).

Another option is to call it “Guided Tasks Application”, “Task List Application”, or some other name with “Task” in the name since it seems to be about tasks (and NOT about “tutorials” - calling a task a tutorial seems a bit stretching the concept of tutorial IMO).

@gabrielc

It should serve as a tutorial showcasing basic features of XWiki

It seems to me that it shouldn’t be restricted to basic features and that we could have some extensions offering non-basic features and still using this extension to let the users learn how to use its features, no?

@gabrielc

The available tasks would be influenced by the extensions installed on the wiki, and the rights of the user.

I think we need to allow extensions to contribute tasks (rather than the main app knowing about other extensions).

@gabrielc

That being said, between instances that are up for at least 1 day, and instances that are up for at least 10 days we can see a drop of 4.7k instances (if I did the math right). That’s thousands of end users that could have used XWiki but currently aren’t, in part due to the lack of an adequate onboarding experience.

I’m not sure how you infer that it’s partly due to the lack of an adequate onboarding experience from those figures (assuming they’re correct, I didn’t check). I’m not saying it’s false but it could be for lots of other reasons, the first one being simply that it doesn’t match the user’s needs, the users don’t like the UI or L&F, etc.

It would have been more interesting to have usage information in the XWiki (something we’re currently lacking, see https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/UsageStatistics).

@gabrielc

Proposal 1: The Guided Tutorial extension should be developed and bundled by default into XWiki Standard. The development process would follow all rules and quality requirements expected of a bundled component.

+1

@gabrielc

Proposal 2: The Guided Tutorial extension should use Cristal technology during its development, as to make it easier to adapt it to Cristal in the future.

+1

@gabrielc

Proposal 3: The Tour App should be deprecated after the Guided Tutorial extension is released.

+1 (and move the Tour app again as a contrib app so that it can still be installed).

@gabrielc

Proposal 4: The Sandbox Space is trying to offer users a way to try out XWiki functionality. Since there’s no explicit prompting for users to do that, I think it currently fails at its goal. Therefore, we need to decide what happens to it:

• Proposal 4.1: No changes, keep Sandbox Space as is.
• Proposal 4.2: Entirely remove the Sandbox Space from XWiki Standard.
• Proposal 4.3: Keep the sandbox space, and make the Guided Tutorial extension interact with it (e.g.: Starting a task would redirect the user to the Sandbox Space, as to not “pollute” the rest of the wiki).

I’m not sure how you infer that “Since there’s no explicit prompting for users to do that, I think it currently fails at its goal” without usage information. Again I’m not saying it’s false, just that we don’t know.

That said, I agree that this app and the Sandbox app are fulfilling the same role (this app being a more elaborate version of the Sandbox), and thus that we don’t need both.

I’m more in favor of 4.2 since, as part of the tasks, we should probably ask the user to create a new page in some space, and add some content, thus recreating something similar to the content of the Sandbox page. Then use this page for other dependent tasks such as adding a comment, mentioning someone, etc.

@mleduc

~80% retention between day 1 and day 5 and 70% retention between days 1 and day 10 does not seem too bad to me.

I also agree that it’s pretty good if the figures are true.

@surli

To be honest, I’m wondering if users even see the Tour App: the icon for starting it is very discrete, so it’s very possible very few users are actually used the Tour App today…

They cannot miss it since it opens a dialog in the middle of the screen the first time they log in

@surli

Now this would probably not be done after first release: most likely it will be done when we consider Guided tutorial extension is good enough in quality to replace it.

+1

Thx