Guiding the user
— February 22 2010
One of the great things about having a support site is realizing what you failed to explain or document in your app.
During the last days, some people didn’t really understand how to assign a task:
Repeated support requests are calling for a change. We need to put information where the user expects it to be. Let’s see how we could explain better the right way to do things for new users.
Primers, your first-time guide
The first time the user visits the task section, there will be nothing there. It’s important to show him how to proceed from there, if possible being coherent with how they will work when the primer is not there anymore.
It’s about setting expectations and teaching what they can get done.
Notice all the text is written from the perspective of the benefits you’ll get from tasks, and not solely the way they work.
Creating task lists and tasks
Once the user is creating a task or task list, we need to guide by design.
We redesigned the form to set expectation on how task lists work, and set optional fields like dates.
More important than this was creating new tasks. We wanted users to set actionable titles, explaining what needs to be done.
Tasks like “do web page” aren’t explicit enough, but “propose new logo” is. So we need to suggest this in the process of creating a new task.
For bonus points, we set an autofocus on this fields to guide the next action.
Placeholders for text fields
Lastly, we used some HTML5 goodness to guide the user when posting a comment.
Empty textfields are yet another opportunity to guide the user. We used this area to give some tips and pointers on using tasks:
Results
Overall, the whole experience of working with tasks has been greatly improved. By teaching, we have smarter and more capable users, and that is great news for any app!