Guided Tours
Step-by-step tour framework for WordPress.com.
What are Guided Tours?
Guided Tours is a framework for easily building tours that show users around a specific part of Calypso.
Mission Statement:
Calypso is powerful, and therefore not easily understood by everyone. This leaves too many users behind. The Guided Tours framework lets us provide context-dependent and skill-appropriate tours that guide users through the UI. This will lead to more users finding value in Calypso earlier.
This is a screen capture of a tour ("siteTitle") that gets triggered when a user has been registered for two days or more but still hasn't changed their site's title from the default "Site Title":
The tour first asks the user whether they want to know more and then walks them through the UI. Tour authors should strive to not just show the user a series of descriptions for UI elements, but instead to have their tour be a guide that nudges users in the right direction. They should leave the clicking of buttons, entering of text, and changing of sections to the user. Also see: "show, don't tell".
These are the core use cases we currently see for Guided Tours:
- Help new users understand what they should be doing next. E.g. guide a new user who hasn't written a blog post yet through the creation of their first one.
- Provide immersive tutorials that help semi-advanced users understand Calypso better. E.g. explain how to set up publicize. Such a tour could be triggered by certain user behavior, or could be linked to using a special URL (see e.g. the experimental
maintour: https://wordpress.com/?tour=main). There's also a Redux acton to trigger a tour -- see docs/API.md for details. - Tours that help address common oversights, such as the title tour mentioned above.
- Announce new or changed features.
Guided Tours sits on top of Calypso, and conceptually isn't part of the UI — one could think of it as a "meta UI". The design of the steps is different from the default Calypso design for this reason: we want Guided Tours to be obviously not part of normal Calypso.
Getting Started
To help you get started with creating your own tours, we have one tutorial available.
Tutorial: Building a Simple Tour
API Overview
See docs/API.md
List of Tours
- Main Tour: This tour is just an example and shouldn't be used in production. It helps useful for trying out framework features and can act as a bit of a canary for problems. The tour shows a few important features of Calypso and was built to help new users find their way around. It didn't perform too well in a test, though, and since then has been used in the aforementioned capacity. (URL scheme to trigger.)