Guided Project Registration

Guided product registration describes tasks and stories aiming to streamline and assist in the process of registering new projects. This includes easily creating various related artifacts such as teams and mailing lists, and in improving the discoverability of relationships between these artifacts.

When discussing guided product registration, we're really targeting two types of users. Guided registration targets novice Launchpad users who may not be aware of all the options open to them, and may not have a clear understanding of the services that can make their use of Launchpad for project management more efficient. For these users, we will guide them through the registration process, likely making assumptions and using defaults in order to give them a common, easy-to-understand project structure. Such users will of course be able to later customize and tailor these artifacts as they become more aware of what Launchpad can provide them.

Expedited registration targets experienced Launchpad users who have a fairly good understanding of the kinds of things they want for their project, and just want a streamlined work flow for creating these artifacts. This process should aim to reduce the click count for creating projects, while allowing for inline selection of additional detail through JavaScript reveals.

Note: this spec incorporates the brain dump from a 2007 sprint.

See also: ProjectAffiliation

Guided

• Ask if this is a big project, personal project, medium project, public project, big project, mature project, etc.
• How much customization should be allowed?
• Links to help and/or the tour along the way

Expedited

• Accordion style reveals for more information.
• When creating the project, prompt for common team names
• Styles or templates for power users?

  Users: <project>-users    [X] include ml [X] Link: [contact-address]
  Devs:  <project>-dev      [X] include ml [X] Link: [bug-contact]
  Ann:   <project>-announce [X] include ml [X] Link: [news]
  Bug:   <project>-bugs     [X] include ml [X] Link: [bug-contact]
  Code:  <project>-commits  [X] include ml [X] Link: [commits]
  Other: <project>-_______  [X] include ml [X] Link: []

JavaScript

For all the u/i proposals here, it is assumed that the user will be using a JavaScript enabled browser. Everything described here can already be accomplished through the normal project and team creation workflows, so there's almost no new underlying functionality here. What is new is the way these options are presented to the user. To take maximum advantage of the possibilities, we'll be using JavaScript extensively. A non-JavaScript user will be able to accomplish everything in this proposal, albeit less conveniently (well, in exactly the same way they can currently do it).

Micro-tours

One way to organize these guided project creation tasks is through the use of micro-tours. A micro-tour is one step, or a small series of steps, used to accomplish part of the guided task. Micro-tours can be combined into one of the larger guided or expedited wizards described above. They can also be used individually after a project has been created, to help that project evolve.

For example, there may be a micro-tour to help projects register a number of teams. This could prompt the user for teams such as myproject-users and myproject-devs. It would also prompt them to ask whether they want mailing lists for those teams. This micro-tour could be part of the original guided project registration, but if say, this step was skipped during that initial registration, the project owner could come back to these steps later when their project has gotten large enough to warrant teams and mailing lists.

This spec must include metric gathering of two types:

• A count of the number of times each micro-tour has been started
• A count of the number of times each micro-tour has been completed

The reason for collecting these statistics is so that we will have a better understanding of which micro-tours people are interested in, and which may not succeed in serving their audience. If a micro-tour is frequently started but abandoned, it's an indication that it's not very useful to users. If a micro-tour is rarely started, then perhaps the micro-tour's goal is not evident.

Stories

Here then are some stories exploring the various tasks and breakdown of work to implement the above vision.

Tour start

As a novice Launchpad user, I would like to be guided through project creation so that I can get started with Launchpad without having to understand everything or hunt through a thousand clicks.

Mock up: plusnew.jpg

• Host your project on LP
• Link LP to your upstream project
  • I'm registrant but not owner
  • Run micro-tours: primary info, bug tracker, code
• Take the LP tour
• Test drive LP
• Search for an existing project
• Return to LP home

Expedited project registration

As an prospective (but experienced) project owner, I would like to fill out a minimal amount of information, so that I can get my new Launchpad project up and running quickly and with a minimal number of clicks.

Mock up: quickproj.jpg

• Project ID

• Project name (i.e. displayname)

• Project summary
• Licenses

Just to be sure, as with reporting a new bug, we'll present the user with a list of potential project matches and ask them to confirm whether they really want to register their project or not.

confirm.jpg

Once the user has confirmed that they want to register, she would end up on the landing page, which gives them easy access to entering additional information. They can also go straight to the normal project home page from there.

landing.jpg

Expedited project import

As the owner of a project already being managed externally, I would like to fill out a minimal amount of information, so that I can have Launchpad import my project with a minimal number of clicks.

• Ask for the minimum information as above: project name, id and summary.
• Ask for project's existing home page, which we could use to see if the
  • project is a duplicate.
• Run various micro-tours for importing bug tracker and code. Possibly run a
  • micro-tour for importing or enabling translations and mailing list subscriptions.

(The querying of the home page was from the original brain dump. It may be useful to ask for this even in the expedited project registration story.)

(The original brain dump all suggests that we detect if the user is asking for Ubuntu CDs. We may also want to do some additional spam-project detection.)

Project details progress meter

As a project owner, I would like to see a progress meter that shows me how much of the project's attributes I've provided, and how many of the available services I've enabled for my project, so that I can have a better sense of how completely my project communicates its intent to my users.

• The idea is something like the Linked-In progress meter that shows you
  • you've filled in 85% of your profile. In this case it would include some text like "Your project profile is 60% complete and you're using 75% of the services available to your project."

Micro-tour: Launchpad primary information

As a project owner, I want Launchpad to ask me about additional information when Launchpad is the primary location for my project, so that I can avail myself of additional Launchpad services.

• Query the user for
  • description
  • license
  • drivers
  • "Uses Launchpad for" stuff, on by default

Micro-tour: Set up bug tracker

As a project owner, I want Launchpad to ask me about the bug tracker information for my project, so that I can mirror, import, or set up the bug tracker for my project.

• If the bug tracker is foreign:
  • Get tracker url
  • Get tracker context (for Bugzilla, Product/Component)
• If the bug tracker is hosted in Launchpad:
  • Query for import if there is an existing foreign tracker
  • Bonus points: do a high fidelity import automatically (outside the scope
    • of this spec).

Micro-tour: Set up translations

As a project owner, I want Launchpad to ask me whether I want to manage translations in Launchpad, so that I can avail myself of that project service more easily.

• Choose translation policy
• Optionally set up translation group
• Upload new templates and translations

Micro-tour: Code

As a project owner, I want Launchpad to ask me whether code will be hosted on Launchpad or imported, so that I can make my code available to my project's users.

• Is code hosted in LP?
• Is code remote?
  • Ask for import url

Micro-tour: Teams

As a project owner, I want Launchpad to guide me through team and mailing list creation, so that I can more easily set up forums for people to participate in my project.

• Ask whether this is a small, medium or large project

• For small projects, offer a team <project>-users and a mailing list

• For medium projects, offer these teams (and mailing lists):

  • <project>-users

  • <project>-developers

• For large projects, offer these teams, mailing lists, and links:

  • <project> as a superteam, no mailing list

  • <project>-users (link to contact-address)

  • <project>-developers (link to default code reviewer)

  • <project>-admin

  • <project>-bugs (link to bug-contact)

  • <project>-commits (subscribe to trunk branch)

Mockups

Here are some hand-drawn mockups of some of the pages. These suck because IANAA, but they are a starting point for discussing the layouts.

Next, the expedited project data input page for hosted projects. This gets revealed on the +new page when you select hosted project on the previous page.

If you're mirroring an external project, you'd see this reveal instead.

mirrored.jpg

Setting up answers, blueprints and translations.

setup.jpg

Setting up the bug tracker.

setupbugs.jpg

Setting up teams.

teams.jpg