Re: Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies
On Friday, 24 June 2016 at 03:14:31 UTC, Carl Vogel wrote: ... 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. :) 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
Re: Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies
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. :)
Re: Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies
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
Re: Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies
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.
Re: Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies
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!
