The Nine Realms

Maps are everywhere in our products. Almost every screen shows something on a map: zones, alerts, devices, the trace of a phone across a city. For years all of this has been drawn by Leaflet , a small and reliable JavaScript mapping library. Leaflet served us well — but over the years it grew roots into every corner of the front-end, and those roots became hard to move.

The task

This hackathon subject is actually the continuation of work started in a previous hackathon under the name “Help me Please”: a system of interactive tours that guide the user through our products. Our solutions offer a large variety of possibilities, and proposing guidance would unlock their full potential to the end user.

Several conclusions were drawn from the “Help Me Please” experience:

• From a user point of view, such tours are typically shown during first launch, which could be, but not always is, the perfect time to bug the user with a long tutorial. Another issue that derives from this is that, once completed or ignored, there is no way to come back to such a guide. “Help me Please” actually solved this problem by presenting a list of scenarios where the user could restart any tutorial from a list. However, we wondered if there were still ways to better integrate the tutorial, our standard documentation and, perhaps, other formats of guidance.

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