digitalmars.D - Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies
- Seb (23/23) Jun 23 2016 Let me start with the good news: since the DLang Tour was
- Carl Vogel (20/34) Jun 23 2016 I don't think you're going to solve this problem with better
- Carl Vogel (4/8) Jun 23 2016 Just to follow up, I realize there's the nav bar at the top. But
- =?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= (19/22) Jun 23 2016 Sorry to repeat myself:
- Carl Vogel (13/22) Jun 23 2016 One thing that might encourage having people move further along
- =?UTF-8?B?QW5kcsOp?= (6/20) Jun 24 2016 Thanks guys for the feedback! Especially the navigation part is
Let me start with the good news: since the DLang Tour was launched by André last month, we had about 3K unique visitors and continuously have between 100-200 visitors per day. However here are the bad news: We loose about 40% of all visitors directly on the front page and we loose the majority (>70%) on the first ten pages. Our DLang Tour is the starting point for newcomers. Hence if you think in terms of Andrei's first five minutes, we loose pretty badly! We already tried to improve things a bit (slicker design, D-man on the front page), but we need your help to motivate future D-eists and inspire them! Last week we split the tour in individual Markdown files per chapter, s.t. improving the tour is only a button click away. Moreover we plan to translate the tour in multiple languages soon [1], so any help in reviewing the tour would be great. If you discover structural problems or want to share improvement ideas, don't hesitate to ping us with a Github issue ;-) Thanks for your help in making our DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies! André & Seb [1] https://github.com/stonemaster/dlang-tour/issues/132 [2] https://github.com/stonemaster/dlang-tour/issues
Jun 23 2016
On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 19:24:49 UTC, Seb wrote:Let me start with the good news: since the DLang Tour was launched by André last month, we had about 3K unique visitors and continuously have between 100-200 visitors per day. However here are the bad news: We loose about 40% of all visitors directly on the front page and we loose the majority (>70%) on the first ten pages. Our DLang Tour is the starting point for newcomers. Hence if you think in terms of Andrei's first five minutes, we loose pretty badly! We already tried to improve things a bit (slicker design, D-man on the front page), but we need your help to motivate future D-eists and inspire them! Last week we split the tour in individual Markdown files per chapter, s.t. improving the tour is only a button click away.I don't think you're going to solve this problem with better content for the tour--since people aren't even really getting to the content. Also, losing people after 10 pages doesn't sound that bad. I wouldn't expect people to go through the whole tour in one sitting. Nonetheless there are a couple of things that make me bounce. The main one is no visible TOC. The only way to move around the tour is to go forward or backward one by one---making it hard to skip around, or understand what topics are coming up. A div on the side with all the section links would be great. Also, while the live code window in the browser is neat, it breaks up the flow of the page, and I feel like I'd usually just prefer inline un-editable text. (E.g., what are you really going to experiment with in the Hello World script here? http://tour.dlang.org/tour/en/basics/imports-and-modules) These are just my opinions, and I don't claim to be representative of the audience you want to attract. Overall, I think this is a fantastic project. Thanks to all who've been working on it!
Jun 23 2016
Carl Vogel <carljv gmail.com> On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 20:25:17 UTC, Carl Vogel wrote:The main one is no visible TOC. The only way to move around the tour is to go forward or backward one by one---making it hard to skip around, or understand what topics are coming up. A div on the side with all the section links would be great.Just to follow up, I realize there's the nav bar at the top. But it doesn't give the same sense of place or order as a vertical hierarchical TOC does.
Jun 23 2016
On 06/23/2016 12:24 PM, Seb wrote:We already tried to improve things a bit (slicker design, D-man on the front page), but we need your help to motivate future D-eists and inspire them!Sorry to repeat myself: - The first navigation link says "Install D Locally". I wouldn't click that link; I just want to get a quick idea about the language, I'm not ready to install it yet. - The page numbers don't make sense: 1/4 2/4 3/4 4/4 1/19 WAT? :) ... - I would like to have the page numbers and the left-right navigation buttons on top (in addition to the ones at the bottom) - I think first few pages have too much text. The tour could give just the flavor of the language as opposed to being a convenient resource hub. But again, thank you for putting this together. It's great but can be greater. :p Ali
Jun 23 2016
On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 19:24:49 UTC, Seb wrote:Let me start with the good news: since the DLang Tour was launched by André last month, we had about 3K unique visitors and continuously have between 100-200 visitors per day. However here are the bad news: We loose about 40% of all visitors directly on the front page and we loose the majority (>70%) on the first ten pages. Our DLang Tour is the starting point for newcomers. Hence if you think in terms of Andrei's first five minutes, we loose pretty badly!One thing that might encourage having people move further along is to set up the interactive code sections as "quizzes." I.e. have the visitor fill in code to give a certain output or pass a unittest instead of just having a pre-written example. This makes the tutorial more interactive and fun. If this is geared towards real newcomers (not just c/c++ converts who are looking for quick reference), then I agree with Ali that less text per section (even if you need lots more bite-sized sections) would be best. If you look at the interactive tutorial on e.g. haskell.org, it moves in VERY small bits -- typing in math, sorting a list, etc. If even Haskell is going to break things down so simply, surely we can too. :)
Jun 23 2016
On Friday, 24 June 2016 at 03:14:31 UTC, Carl Vogel wrote:Thanks guys for the feedback! Especially the navigation part is already listed as an issue because it has been one of the recurring problems users reported. Regards, André...One thing that might encourage having people move further along is to set up the interactive code sections as "quizzes." I.e. have the visitor fill in code to give a certain output or pass a unittest instead of just having a pre-written example. This makes the tutorial more interactive and fun. If this is geared towards real newcomers (not just c/c++ converts who are looking for quick reference), then I agree with Ali that less text per section (even if you need lots more bite-sized sections) would be best. If you look at the interactive tutorial on e.g. haskell.org, it moves in VERY small bits -- typing in math, sorting a list, etc. If even Haskell is going to break things down so simply, surely we can too. :)
Jun 24 2016