28 February - Add step

This article is from before the rebranding to SelfGuide. Text and images can include the old product name ProductivityPerformer or its abbreviation PP.

Did you forget to record the last step? Does an application change require an additional step in the Instruction? Do you want the Instruction to start earlier? These are all situations where it's required to add steps to an Instruction while the existing steps in the Instruction didn't change. Use the new Add step functionality to add the necessary steps without the need to record the entire Instruction again. Read more about this and other changes below.

Add step

The correct steps can make or break how a user experiences an instruction. Steps need to display the required information, but there should also be no missing steps, not too many steps, they should be in the right order and need to be grouped together. Always recording the entire instruction when a step needs to be added ensures these needs are fulfilled, but it is also cumbersome and not necessary in all situations. To make it easier to extend an Instruction, the Add step functionality has been built.

The Add step functionality works in the same way as the Update image & action functionality. As an editor you are guided through:

  1. Choosing where the step is added (before or after the selected step)
  2. Starting the SelfGuide Recorder
  3. Choosing which recorded step to add

The Add step functionality has been included as an additional feature. The existing update functionality, which allows an editor to update an entire Instruction at once, will remain.

Edit instruction from the viewer

A familiar scenario for all editors: you open an instruction, and then remember you need to close the viewer and use the context menu to open the editor window.

Since this was a common situation which could be made more intuitive, an Edit button has been added to the viewer. The editor will return to the viewer when closed and refresh the Instruction so that any changes made are immediately visible.

Easier to add and update a censor area

Censor areas are often used in Instructions, since it's a common occurrence that an Instruction contains sensitive information in one or more steps. Adding a new censor area still functioned as 'wizard', a process which could be streamlined. In this release, this behavior and functionality has been made much easier to use:

  1. The button clearly explains in what it does: Add censor area
  2. When finished selecting an area, the censor area is immediately added and selected. There is no longer a need to confirm the selected area to finish the wizard
  3. All unsaved censor areas can be selected and resized until the changes are saved

Copy and paste a censor area

Besides making it easier to add new censor areas, we also spent time addressing the use case where the same censor area needs to be applied to several steps. Any censor area, whether saved or unsaved, can be selected. After selecting a censor area, it can be copied using the Copy option in the context menu. Once a censor area is copied, that censor area can be pasted onto other steps in the Instruction.

This is not only a quicker way to apply the same censor area on different steps, but also offers an improvement from a qualitative perspective. Since the areas are in the exact same place on multiple steps, it is less distracting to the user when they navigate through the Instruction.

German language

German has been added as translation to make SelfGuide more suitable for German speaking users. SelfGuide adopts the user's browser language, so the UI will automatically be shown in German language if this is the preferred language set in the browser preferences.

Expand / collapse navigation pane

A few releases ago, the navigation pane was updated to be more intuitive. We might have been too enthusiastic in making this change, as we received feedback that some users found the hover effect to be distracting. We have further improved the behavior by adding a manual collapse and expand toggle control with a corresponding user preference. This behavior gives control to the user over how the navigation pane should be visualized.

The new behavior explained:

  • By default the navigation pane is expanded
  • The right border has a resize toggle, and when clicked the navigation pane is collapsed
  • When the right border is clicked again, the navigation pane is expanded
  • The chosen behavior is stored as a user preference and will be kept until changed by the user

Accessibility updates

  • The font used throughout the product has been updated to a more modern and readable font
  • Color usage has been improved for specific scenarios

Bugfixes

  • The select all checkbox in the Add Instruction and Add Exercise modal did not work anymore