Simplifying the getting started experience?

[davenice]

We had an internal user pick up Zowe Explorer.

It was interesting discussing their experience. I helped them with some suggestions for the Zowe config file initially then left them to it.

There were a few key points of confusion...

1. They clicked + to add a profile then got taken into the config file. They added the connection to the config file but were confused when it didn't appear in the tree automatically.
2. They eventually found the + button again to add the profile, but found the "Do you want to apply this for all trees?" message confusing - e.g. at this point there is no tree so talking about a tree is confusing. And talking about all trees is difficult.
3. They expected to get an option to connect and see if the profile was working correctly. It wasn't clear that you just try to do something to make it work.

[davenice]

I had a few thoughts about what we could do to improve things, but thought a wider discussion would be good!

1. When a new connection is added to the config file - I wonder if it's feasible to notify the user somehow that the new profile is available? Or somehow make the next action clear ... perhaps we'd show the connection as a ghost they could click on to materialise it? Obviously this would be a "just after we spot a new connection appear" thing.

2. I think we could quite cheaply reword the "apply this for all trees" to be more specific about what you're doing ... "Do you want to add this profile to the data sets, unix system services, and jobs views?" ... "Yes - add to all views" / "No - add to just the x view"?

3. I'm not sure what to do about this other than I wondered about extending the new release notes page to have some getting started prompts. I wondered if there were more "VS Code native" suggestions that people have seen in other extensions? I think in general the "I installed the extension ... now what" is a problem that hits every first time user.

[davenice]

On (1)...

• there might already be a notification with a next step, when you start up (to check!)
• we could potentially use the blank space in the tree view somehow when the user doesn't have any profiles?
• we considered a modal dialog but not keen
• it might be hard to detect when a new profile was added (would need to track before/after state)

On (2)

• might need to consider other extenders adding views that would also use the same sets of profiles. how would we put that in the text?
• ... but could that be a problem for later? :-D

[jt-nti]

For 3 (now what?), VS Code seems to have the concept of walkthroughs which might be worth investigating...

• https://code.visualstudio.com/api/ux-guidelines/walkthroughs

There should be some in "Help: Open Walkthrough..." for example.

(Aside: I just tried opening with no config files and I didn't spot any warnings about not having any profiles,– not sure what I should be seeing or whether it's just my machine.)