Re: Guided image selection: POC, RFC

On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 10:56:43PM +0100, Jonas Meurer wrote:
> Hi Wouter,
> 
> 
> Thumbs up for taking action and working on a practical solution to the
> problems discussed on [email protected]!
> 
> 
> > I spent much of today on a bit of Javascript to guide a user through
> > selecting the right image for his or her use case; the idea being that
> > we'd ask them a few questions, and then say "this is the image you'll
> > need to download if you want to install Debian like that".>
> > A proof of concept is up at
> > http://latin.grep.be/~wouter/debian-www/releases/stable/debian-installer/
> 
> 
> I quite like the idea of such a walkthrough. In my eyes it would be a
> great improvement to the current situation and I'm in favor of further
> developing it as our new download page.
> 
> As you wrote yourself, it's quite rough at the moment, but that can be
> fixed :)

Right :-)

> > If people like this, it will require some more work before it can go
> > live. In particular:
> > - It currently has no visual appeal. Someone with better graphical
> >   design skills than myself will have to fix that.
> 
> Unfortunately I cannot help either here ;)
> 
> First thing I noticed: the cursor doesn't change when moving over the
> selection options. The cursor should indicate that you can click on the
> fields by changing to the usual hover-over-link cursor (no idea how it's
> called in webdesign language).

That would be the "cursor:pointer" CSS value. Good point, thanks. Added that.

> > - After asking questions, it tells you 'this is what you asked for', but
> >   it doesn't actually give you the URL, because that part hasn't been
> >   implemented yet.
> > - There is a button "disable this, give me the full list". Once you
> >   click on it, it's gone and there's no way to get it back (other than a
> >   page refresh). This may not be ideal.
> 
> In general the navigation needs to be worked on. There should be options
> to go back and forth in the walkthrough. That's completely missing so far.

A back button is actually slightly more complicated than I thought at
first, but it's a good point and I should add it. I'll work on it some
more.

A "start over from scratch" button is reasonably simple though; I've
just added that.

I don't think a "go forward" button is useful, and I'm also not sure
what it should do, so I'm not adding that.

> > I decided not to spend too much time on that now though, since I thought
> > it would make more sense to show what I've got so far and ask for
> > people's thoughts.
> 
> Again, great that you actually started working on it. As said above, I
> like the idea.

Thanks.