A new version of Web Assistant (2.4.1) was released today. There’s still some teething problems with it (some screens double-up on the padding afforded to the Carousel, and it seems to make the browser churn through the CPU at an alarming rate), but at first blush it certainly looks like a visual improvement. Overall, the space it takes up has been significantly tightened up in just about all areas, making it less intrusive, and simpler to navigate.
The first thing you’ll notice is that when you call up the Web Assistant – via the familiar question-mark icon (?) – it displays as a thin slice along the rightmost side of the screen (similar now to Desktop Assistant), instead of opening the full carousel:
This ‘Help Stripe’ contains (up to) four icons, representing (from top to bottom in the image above):
- Help Topics (Tiles)
- Guided Tours
- Learning (the old ‘Learning’ tile)
- What’s New
By default, the Help Topics category is selected, so you can see all of the Hotspots on the screen. Clicking on one of these Hotspots will display the Help Bubble (as before), but still without the Carousel being displayed. You can open the full Carousel by clicking on the relevant category icon. Here’s the Help Topics version:
It’s not immediately obvious in this example, but there’s also another significant change, here: the ’tiles’ themselves are dynamically sized! Look at the Search tile, which has two lines of text, and the Notifications tile, which has only one. They both take up only the amount of space they need. And this holds true all the way from zero lines of ‘short description’ all the way up to as many lines as you need. But it doesn’t end there… If you’re typically short of space because you have a lot of Help Tiles per screen, you can set the new showShortDescription property to false (you can test it by using &help-showShortDescription=false in the URL), and the Carousel will show only the tile Titles and not the description text (which, frankly, is often repetitive of what is in the associated Bubble, anyway…), until the user explicitly clicks on the tile, at which point only that one tile is expanded (personally, I would have preferred Tiles to be expanded on hover, but…). This is shown in the image below:
You’ll also notice in these examples that the Search function is featured more prominently, immediately below the (new) help category title.
Now, back to the other icons on the ‘Help Stripe’. Clicking on any of these will show the available ‘help’ within that category within the carousel itself. So if you click on Guided Tours, the available tours are listed on the Carousel, as shown below:
This is nice, because it keeps everything self-contained within the Carousel, simplifying navigation, and being less intrusive into the application screen. Obviously, selecting a Guided Tour opens it up on top of the application screen, but even there, things have been simplified. The whole Guided Tour step Bubble has been compressed, and the step number has been eliminated (I’m not sure I prefer this, but the step number wasn’t really necessary – or always accurate, given the option to hide steps for absent screen elements, anyway).
The Learning icon also works in a similar way. Clicking on this will effectively open what was the Recommended Learning dialog box, but within the Carousel:
A couple of things to note, here. Firstly, you still get a list of training content (simulations or Books / Book Pages) for the current context, including the Feedback button (which I’d still like to see as an option on the Carousel for every screen by default). You also still get the Learning Center and Community buttons (if enabled in your environment) – these work exactly the same way as before. Note also how they are displayed: as text in a rounded-corner rectangle within a tile. This is exactly how all Link Tiles are displayed now, which is satisfyingly consistent (although dispensing with the rectangle border and just having an ‘external link’ icon on the rightmost side would perhaps be cleaner…).
Finally, What’s New content is also incorporated into the same, single Carousel (obviously) accessible via the What’s New icon on the Help Stripe. Previously it opened in its own Carousel (replacing the standard Carousel) which was a bit confusing and unintuitive for users, so this is a big improvement.
So far so good for consumers, but what about editing? As far as I can tell, there’s no new functionality, and not really a lot in terms of changes in general. Most noticeably, the interface has been cleaned up a bit, especially in the Tile Editor, where the Assign Hotspot and Preview buttons have changed from being text-based buttons to icons (now that we’re all familiar with them, I guess) – see the lower-left icons in the following image:
You can also see, in the background on the right of the image above, that the ‘Move Up/Down’ buttons for reordering tiles within the Carousel have been streamlined slightly.
One last item of note: The Options button in the Editor view (the ‘gear’ icon towards the bottom of the Help Stripe) now has an additional two selections:
Product Feedback takes you to a simple survey form where you can provide SAP with your feedback on the SAP Enable Now product, and Release Information takes you to the release notes for the current version (although for 2.4.1 this consisted of a single Book Page that contained less information than I’ve given you above!).
A side-effect of all of this optimization of the Carousel – and the dynamic sizing of tiles in particular – is that the new changes have been designed specifically for Vertical mode, which means that Horizontal mode is no longer available. This could well be a significant change for organizations using Horizontal view, but personally I never liked that mode anyway, so it’s no great loss.
And that’s all I have found so far. I’ll post details of other changes to Twitter (@EnableNowExpert) as I find them, and if you find anything exciting, feel free to leave a comment below.
