Extension:GuidedTour

Guided Tour is a MediaWiki extension which provides a framework for creating "guided tours", or interactive tutorials for MediaWiki features. Tours typically walk a user through some standard workflow (like editing an article or uploading an image) and are implemented as a series of dialog boxes that tell that the user where to click and what to do next.

Tours are backed by JavaScript and PHP code that can monitor the user's progress, check his or her understanding, and offer advice and encouragement. Guided tours are an effective means for breaking down complex tasks into a series of simple, discrete sub-tasks, and for giving the user the experience and confidence needed to repeat the workflow for similar tasks in the future. Tours may also be used to implement interactive surveys.

GuidedTour is developed by the editor engagement experiments team using a variant of Optimize.ly's Guiders library. It originally started at WMF Tech Days 2012.

Rationale
Our communities were once limited to using static wiki pages, templates, and other functions to build tutorials and tours of any kind. As rich as tools like Wikipedia:Tutorial might be, they interrupt the user and force them to go to a separate Web page. They are also quite long; most documentation about Wikipedia would take quite some time to read in full. Guided tours are listed in our feature map as a potential as a tool for new editor support.

User experience
Interactive guided tours provide a simple, step-by-step guide through a feature set without interrupting the user. Guided tours don't dominate the screen, are dismissable, and walk the user through a task directly. Guided tours are also ideally something that one can return to at any time when you need it.

Each step in a guided tour is called a "guider".

Description of guider elements

 * Title: Names the current step. If the title is the beginning of the tour, you may need to use it to describe the tour as a whole. If your tour title is more than one line, it's too long.


 * Body text: Describes the current step. If you make additional points unnecessary for the user to understand how to move to the next step, you're saying too much. Guided tours are effective not just because tooltips point at things, but because they limit instructional text to what is immediately necessary, rather than trying to dump paragraphs of documentation on a user all at once.


 * Buttons: tour buttons are for actions, typically progressing the user to the next step. It is a poor practice to provide multiple action buttons, e.g. "Start tour" plus "Next". Choose one action you want the user to take in response to a tour step, focus on completion of that action. Never use the action button for ending the tour (unless the user is actually at the end), since this muddles whether the primary action buttons is for continuing the tour or ending it (positive vs. negative action).


 * Close button (X): provides an obvious element for dismissing a tour, as opposed to simply closing a single guider, which can be done by an outside click or hitting ESC. If the user clicks this close button, it should end the tour across pages, and will clear the associated tour from the user's cookies.

Description of guider behavior
Keep in mind the following default behaviors for guided tours.
 * If a user has launched multiple tours, the most recent tour started will always be displayed, if there is a conflict.
 * You can force a tour to "stick" to a particular page. If you have not defined this behavior in your tour, a tour in progress might keep showing across pages. For instance, if you have a tour that points to the "Save" button, a tour that is in progress might point at this element every time until the user moves to the next step or dismisses the tour.
 * The page will scroll vertically to a guider's position, if it is out of view (i.e. above or below the fold). You can disable this for individual steps.
 * A guider will flip horizontally to the left or right, if it would otherwise be cut off by the width of the user's browser. You can also disable this for each step.

Designing a tour
If you want to make your own guided your, here are some maxims to consider.


 * 1) Choose a primary goal for the tour. What do you want users to learn by the end?
 * 2) Know who your audience is before you start, and what their goals and experiences are. What knowledge about a process do they have before starting your tour?
 * 3) Plot the necessary steps, focusing on the one action or key takeaway for each step. Less is more. The more steps in your tour, the more likely a user is to abandon your tour in the middle.
 * 4) Tours can be started via a link or button within a page, or automatically via a cookie. How you start a tour has a big impact on the potential for delivering tours that interrupt or annoy users, so choose carefully.
 * 5) Let the steps and their associated actions guide the design of the tour. For example, if you want users to edit as one step, pointing directly to the edit button is the obvious and efficient thing to do. A poor alternative would be to have a center-aligned window with an image and description of the edit tab. The strength of tooltip-based tours is that you can show users what to do, instead of simply describing it.
 * 6) Choose titles, body text, and images only after you have plotted all steps in your tour.

List of tours
The following tours are currently packaged with the extension, and are thus available on any wiki where GuidedTour is installed.


 * test - Simple tour to show what tours can do.
 * gettingstarted - Tour to help the user make their first edit. The primary test case will be for Extension:GettingStarted, but is very close to being a general "make your first edit" tour. This tour is a product of the requirements for our onboarding new Wikipedians project.

Tour ideas
Potential tours include nearly all tasks currently covered by help documentation in Wikimedia projects. We're starting with Wikipedia, and with tasks that are most common or attractive to new registered editors, since they are a group most likely to need a guided tour of an interface or activity.


 * Page creation
 * 'Your user page' - what it's for, etc.
 * How to add/edit a reference
 * How to add an image
 * Watchlist - what are the important elements of it, how to add stuff to it, etc.
 * Process helpers: how to request a move, how to file a deletion request, etc.

Please add to the list!

Technical documentation
We're building guided tours with the Guiders.js library (github, Local Guiders branch). Guiders is under an Apache 2.0 license and has been used by WordPress, Drupal, and others. We incorporate the Guiders library into an Extension:GuidedTour, and can feed changes upstream. If you'd like to help out or follow progress, you can check Bugzilla.

Building and launching tours
You launch a guided tour on a page by adding  to the query string of a URL linking to it, or by calling   to set a cookie for the next page load. You can set the cookie from the server if appropriate too. This will cause the GuidedTour extension to load both the code to display the tour and the tour itself.

You define your tour in a JavaScript file in your extension, or in the MediaWiki namespace (MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-tourname.js). Much of this file simply names the elements of each step of the tour — a titlemsg, descriptionmsg, a 'next' button, etc. Individual wikis can override the CSS at MediaWiki:Guidedtour-custom.css.


 * To add a tour by editing your wiki, see /Write an on-wiki tour
 * To bundle a tour with your extension,see /Write an extension tour
 * For API documentation, see http://e3doc.wmflabs.org/GuidedTour/#!/api/mw.guidedTour

Installation

 * 1) Open a shell and navigate to your extensions directory.
 * 2) Run:
 * 3) Add the following lines to your LocalSettings.php:
 * 1) Add the following lines to your LocalSettings.php:

Test that it worked by calling a page with  appended to the URL. For example: http://localhost/w/index.php?tour=test

Usage

 * 1) Write a real tour on a page in the MediaWiki namespage.  It must be named  MediaWiki:GuidedTour-tour-tour name.js, for example MediaWiki:GuidedTour-tour-mytour.js
 * 2) Call your intended page with tour=mytour appended to the URL. For example
 * http://localhost/w/index.php?tour=mytour, or ?tour=test for the example above.
 * 1) To style the output, either edit the css file in the modules directory or provide a file of overrides on the wiki page MediaWiki:GuidedTour/custom.css

Note: for security reasons, tours cannot run on some pages, including login, account creation, user preferences, and password reset.

Dependencies
It depends on Extension:EventLogging, so that must be installed first.

Status
(Regular status updates)