Page help text goes unnoticed

[arildm]

At several occations in user testing, the user has been confused and had a question which would be answered if they would see and read the page help text, which is in a blue box on most pages.

Not sure what alternatives are better. Some suggestions:

• Make it bounce or blink a little if the user doesn't do anything after a while on the page

• Wizard-like "speech bubbles" positioned near relevant parts of the page

• Minimize the use of contrast, so that when it is present, it gets noticed. For example, clarifications like

  These settings are information for the automatic analysis; they will affect the parsing or annotation.

  might not need to call for a lot of attention, while instructions like

  The corpus needs a name before it can be processed.

  probably does.

It could also be that the testing conditions are different enough from if the user would try Mink out on their own – that they are less inclined to read instructions when someone is watching over their shoulder.

Related:

• Less distracting corpus overview? #68

[arildm]

I think we should distinguish help boxes that are important (e.g. when action is required) from those that are only informational. Informational boxes could be gray. We could also use different icons.

Important boxes could possibly be a little bit animated. But, if possible, it would be nice if the same text wasn't animated more than once, for instance when navigating between pages.

[arildm]

Added a distinction between gray and blue in a490f46, let's try that out for now.