First Look at an Incubation Project: Guided Tours - Visual Content - Visual Content (Comics, etc.)

Thanks for reading our past posts about the technology comics and commenting on them. Again, if you have not downloaded copies please do and share them with your colleagues and let us know your thoughts. You can visit the following pages to take a look:

In this post, we’d like to discuss another project that we worked on somewhat related to the comics in terms of visual learning. We call them Guided Tours. Of course, we have to preface this with a disclaimer that this is a prototype, not supported, may not have further development, etc. Nonetheless, we think that Guided Tours are cool and encourage you to read through this article to get a better understanding of what they are. Basically, we wanted to put together this prototype to demonstrate an alternate learning style - more interactive and visually-oriented, something different than a typical overview article. You'll notice a more illustrative style paired with animation, as opposed to static icons. Our goals with this project were to:

Address the evaluation phase of the IT life cycle by helping users assess a particular technical landscape or understand cross-product workloads at a high-level
Provide an interactive, animation-based information experience
Focus on the system view, not the product features

And then secondarily, to:

Present information in a “fun” form-factor
Compel users to interact with information

After interacting with a Guided Tour application, the user should be able to fully assess a technology, scenario, or workload. We think the application could have several uses. Below is a wire-frame of the application:

As you can see, the experience breaks down into a few key areas:

Topic Summary to orient the user
A Central Navigation Hub which will show a visualization of the technology, scenario, or workload with clickable illustrations that link to more information
Perspective Views which allow users to filter the central image to highlight various aspects of the technology, scenario, or workload, such as security, performance, and/or business views
A Learn More pane which can display additional information on objects selected in the Central Navigation Hub
And finally, a link to one of the technology comics relevant to the technology, scenario, or workload

We also provide alternate views within the Guided Tour application, such as a flowchart view and a reading view (information pane), which you can see illustrated below:

Another important aspect of this project was the visual style. We wanted to create something very different than what you see today in our technical documentation. Some users will like it and some users may find it too whimsical for technical documentation. Below you'll see some examples illustrations so that you can decided for yourself:

The upper row represents the following: Branch Office, User, Community, Configuration, BI, Application, File Share, and Financial Industry. We are curious what you think about this more casual, engaging visual style. Is it something that would make you more likely to read through technical content? Less likely?

Below are high-fidelity screen shots of the Guided Tours complete with the new visual style, which you can also compare to the above wire-frames. First, the home page:

In a week or so, we'll have a live Guided Tour up-and-running for you to test out. In that post, we'll give you a detailed tour of the UI. But, to finish up this post, we have a few more high-fidelity screens, including the flowchart view below:

And then the information pane view:

Check back in the next week or so and we’ll have our Guided Tour *Prototype* up and running for you to try out!