Optimizely Open-Sources Guiders.js, a Library to Help You Guide New Users | Hacker News Reader

Optimizely Open-Sources Guiders.js, a Library to Help You Guide New Users

blog.optimizely.com

192 pointsdsiroker26 comments

Does anyone know of a good online catalog where libraries like this are curated? Or are folks just bookmarking these as they find them?

openjsan.org, JQuery plugins catalog, and that's all AFAIK.

(Yes, CPAN is still unique after so many years)

http://ruby-toolbox.com/ for ruby stuff

Oh, not again.

1) It should be one (and only one) location when you can find every module/plugin/library written in %language%

Hmm, should I continue?

Yes, obviously what you describe you would nice. But in the meantime, a few scattered sources are better than nothing.

This is what I get for trying to be helpful...

There's also EveryJS: http://www.everyjs.com/

Fork or follow on github?

I use the watch feature on github for my personal curation of interesting plugins/projects

The Changelog blog isn't half bad: http://thechangelog.com/

The blog + podcast combo is a cool idea, I don't really to podcasts but 5by5 rekindled that interest so I might check it out.

I usually just follow or fork projects I end up using, Instapaper and/or bookmark the rest or just google when I need it.

Some projects maintain uncurated lists of packages[1] but it's easy to narrow it down. Open them all up in tabs and then eliminate. Number of followers & forks is often a good indicator of health, commits is the next page to check for signs of life. Also issues. Be your own "curator" and evaluate a few options, many libs are easy to try out.

Readme, docs and code also count of course, that's a given.

[1] https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules

This is really great. We live in interesting times. It really gets easier to make cool stuff every day with all those tools.

Does any know what other sites apart from Optimizely that use Guiders.js or have a similar interactive tour? I have been developing something very similar for my app and am very interested in seeing examples of how to best structure the walk-through.

OK, enough is enough. Now I have no choice but to scrap prototype in favour of jQuery.

I built a similar library on top of YUI called Feature Cue while I was at Yahoo! Sadly it was never open sourced, got rewritten, over-engineered and (as far as I know) faded into obscurity.

I'm glad the Optimizely guys have released their version, because based on our user testing novice users really respond well to this kind of interactive product tour.

This sounds like a great idea, but I (as a webapp user) would probably say "No thanks" to the guide to take a first look at a website before trying to go through a bunch of dialog boxes.

I wonder what % of users will go through a guide like this.

What would help you start then? Another type of documentation? Just browsing the app?

An easy to activate the guide later on. (You probably have that - I just mean that I would like to get rid of the first popup offering a guide to see the product itself)

Its a great idea, and I'll try to use in my app.

I believe you missed the point, this is to help users start interacting with the app, it's not on the homepage. So as someone visiting the site you would see if you like its idea or not and then, if you do, you would for instance try a demo. That's where this kicks in, it helps you with your first actions.

It might make sense for some apps to use this directly on the homepage but that would probably be the exception to the rule.

You're right - I made the exception the rule. Thanks for the clarification.

Pretty cool, Would be good to make the jQuery dependency more prominent. Was looking to create my own form of this but will use this instead. Does it require jQuery UI library?

Great point, we can add a note to the README in GitHub.

To answer your question, this library does NOT require the jQuery UI library.

If anyone is interested, we'd love to get some help with the Guiders.js -- please email john@min.us - would love to try this out!

I just started using blockui for an attempt as a crude sort of Guider. Looking into this now, thanks.

I love the idea of using this for new features. Consider me sold.

Looks awesome, what version of jQuery is required?

It should work great with jQuery 1.5.1 and later. We've heard reports that it doesn't work well with jQuery 1.4.x but that is probably a bug we can fix since it doesn't rely on any new jQuery features as far as I know.

That's correct.

I just tried loading it with jQuery 1.4.1 and got the error: "$.type is not a function". So I replaced the $.type use with something else.

If using jQuery 1.4.x is important to you, you can download it again. I just pushed the fix to GitHub.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com