Sometimes the underlying processes an application is designed for are too complex to be self-explanatory. Look at e.g. Photoshop, would not work without tutorials.

Photoshop doesn't have overlay help such as this.

I'm not arguing against any help, I'm simply stating that if it's easy enough to explain with an overlay then it's probably possible to make the interface intuitive enough without it.

iPhoto on the ipad has overlays. Same sort of app, focus on usability, on a usability focussed device, but still overlays are needed...

Agreed. There's been a few of these plugins and saas offerings recently, and neither of them feel quite right to me.

thanks, we will make it easier, i don't know, maybe with a wizard? ha

pistoriusp's comment isn't about trip.js, it's about overall design of sites. The goal of a UX engineer is to make things like trip.js obsolete. The design should be clean and self explanatory.

I 100% agree with your comment. That is most definitely the goal of a UX engineer. However it's kind of like striving for perfection, it's impossible. If anything a really good UX engineer shoots for that 100% and fills in the rest with these types of tools. Can anyone here point to a complex webapp that doesn't have some kind of instructions system?

Hi! Great to see another take on this paradigm. A few comments...

1. The tooltips don't seem to be aware of the size of the view screen. During the tutorial one of the tooltips appeared offscreen because it (probably) assumed my window was big enough to see everything.

2. The speed was too quick. I barely had enough time to orient my eyes then read the tip before it moving on. Considering that, I think automation in this way is undesirable. Each step should probably be user driven.

3. To make the site look a little more professional you could remove the space in front of the exclamation points.

I kinda dislike how the pace is predefined, I think as an user I would prefer it to let me click to go to the next step.

Explicit actions would have been better.

Promising start, but in the spirit of "Don't Make Me Think", it needs to make it obvious what to do next, ie that you can click anywhere, and whether real clicks would be ignored or not. e.g. a translucent mask with instructions.

very nice.

something similar in foundation http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-p...

I'm the founder of Tutorialize and honestly I love that these tools keep popping up! We're all trying to accomplish the same task, and for good reason. If your UI is so simple that it doesn't require some kind of guidance system, then your site probably doesn't do much. There is a reason why everything that's even a little bit complex comes with a manual. Anyways, keep'm coming!

Pressing ESC key stops the tour. An explicit action visible to the user to cancel the "trip" should be better.

hey guys, I am EragonJ! thanks for all your comments for Trip.js ! I will keep following all good designs from other libraries and your good recommendations ! :]

Doesn't work very well on Android browser.

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