I'm currently working on a VE-focused guided tour for student editors in Wiki Education Foundation courses. The problem I'm running into is that the first-edit features are interfering with the tour I'm designing. Having the blue dots glowing on the Cite and Link buttons leads users off the track of my tour.
I think a good solution in general would be to disable all the built-in onboarding functionality while a url-specificied (?tour=foo) tour is active.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T122557 Onboarding message and pulsating blue dots should be disabled if a url-specified GuidedTour is active | |||
| Open | None | T122623 Allow hiding VE onboarding experience programmatically to avoid sidetracking users using a different onboarding experience |
@Ragesoss and I discussed this on IRC. This onboarding functionality of VisualEditor (welcome dialog and blue dots pointing to tutorial dialogs) actually does not use GuidedTour infrastructure.
Ragesoss, can you update with the current status?
Here's the current state of the VE tour I'm working on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-wikiedbebold.js
You can try it out here by starting here: https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/students/editing-basics/be-bold-tutorial
In general, it's very easy a guided tour and the VE onboarding features to overlap, which will usually ruin both and is confusing to the user. From a UX perspective, I think the best thing would be to disable those VE onboarding tools whenever a guided tour is active. Guided tours are useful for designing a custom onboarding experience for specific users who come on board through specific paths, so in those cases the tour should take precedence.
Currently, my tour uses the vehidebetadialog=1 param to work around the onboarding message, and the current design doesn't give any specific guidance for the very first edit — it just says 'edit something' — so that it won't collide with the blue dots and their modals. But it would be much nicer to be able to know reliably that those features weren't going to interfere. (See also T122623)