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Before starting this exercise you need to be logged in to 3DSPACE with a user having access to create parts (it is possible to create similar guides if you are missing create part access). Also you need to have the Author extension installed and connected with a repository. |
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Please comment and provide feedback if something is not clear or needs improvement |
Guide creation
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A guide is a holder of a series of instructions. It typically guides the user through a process. Each guide should have a short title and a description. The description is used by users to find the right guide so make sure that the description is detailed and contains as many key words as possible. A good practice is to end with describing where the guide is available e.g. “available from the home page of 3dspace” |
Instruction creation
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Guides are built up by a series of instructions. You create instructions by point and click in the target application.
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Instructions delivered at the right time
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Target and app states allow you to control when instructions are shown. States are enablers for just-in-time instruction delivery and allows for starting or resuming guides at any time (even in the middle of process). 💎 Using states is good for performance as non matching targets are filtered out from evaluation. A good state selection is also good for usability and allows the user to get the right instruction at the right time. Try having one callout only for any given time is good practice. Target states: allow you to control when a callout is displayed based on the state of the target itself and is only available for targets that have a state. App states: allow you to control when a callout is displayed based on the global state of the app. This depends overall on what you currently see not what is selected. Note: All states are captured during target selection. If you need to enable a different state not in list you need to first put the application in that state and reselect. |
Instruction sequences
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Guides are built up by instruction sequences. To make the most user friendly guide, good practice is to have one instruction display at a time. Target and app states are not always enough and condition elements and sequences are other tools to achieve step-by-step guidance. Condition elements: Condition elements use target elements to validate state. You can see condition elements as ad-hoc app states that you define yourself to control visibility. Condition elements target states is very useful to build dynamic sequences. Benefits of using conditionals for sequencing is that it is state driven which means that users can move back and forward in process or leave and resume or start at any time. ❗Sequence dependencies: In cases when there is nothing in the UI to use as a condition for state driven sequencing you can use direct sequencing as last resort. Direct sequencing is dependent on that the sequenced dependency callout has or has not yet shown rather than element state. So to support multiple iterations within the same session you also need to reset the sequence, otherwise the “after” sequence will be valid for that full session. Starting or resuming next session in the middle of such a sequence is not possible. |
Other options in the authoring toolset
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In real customer setup with a large amount of guides and different situations there are also other options available to consider for making good user friendly guides. Anchor points: Controls the positioning preference of a callout. Some logic will automatically override preference positioning when suitable. Tags: Tags are used by consumers to filter out guides of interest to them. A tag could be experience level or typically a role. Colours: Assigning colour to guides or even individual instructions could be a good way to visually sort or bring extra attention. Finding the right guide: Some customers record a large number of guides and it could be hard to find the one you are looking for. To help users find guides there is a search tool. The search tool filters on all callout text content and guide description. Currently it requires an exact match but a more smart semantic search is planned. To increase chance of users finding guides provide a rich description using many different key words. It is good practice to end with describing where the guide is available e.g. “available from the home page of 3dspace” Callout types: For different scenarios different callout types make sense. Authors can select among several different types. Performance: The server mainly acts as a repository of configuration and all instructions are evaluated client side in browser. Evaluation is carefully designed with performance in mind but still it is possible to make recordings affecting client performance. Evaluation share target platform render resources and can affect overall platform rendering. App states evaluate on each web page mutation to filter out instructions irrelevant for the current state. After state filtering targets are evaluated using highly efficient css selectors for supported targets or less performing custom selects by fall back xpath based evaluation. ❗ Recording a large amount of instructions on the same app state using complex xpaths will affect overall performance for that app state and should be avoided. ✅ Instead use as much app state and green targets as possible. |
Mastering guide creation
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This is your final test. Do you remember your training well enough to record by heart? |