12 June - Use SelfGuide on mobile devices

This article is from before the rebranding to SelfGuide. Text and images can include the old product name ProductivityPerformer or its abbreviation PP.

The previous release introduced the responsive instruction viewer to enable a user to open a link to an Instruction on a mobile device. In this release, we continue the mobile responsive journey by making other functionality mobile responsive too. Read more about this and other changes below.

Use SelfGuide on mobile devices

We have continued working on a responsive interface to make SelfGuide available on mobile devices. The previous release focused on a responsive Instruction viewer so that a user is able to open a link to an Instruction and view this Instruction. For this release, we focused on opening SelfGuide on a mobile device, searching for an Instruction and viewing the Instruction itself. A summary of changes:

  • The Instruction library, with the search & filter functionality, has been made responsive so a user is able to find and open Instructions.
  • The User Guide library and the User Guide detail window are made responsive so a user can read a User Guide
  • The Course library has been made responsive so a user can view which Courses are available
  • The Course detail window informs the user to use a non-mobile device to follow the Course
  • Users with an editor role have additional functionality in the libraries (for example list view, create a new entity, change content channel assignments, etc.). This functionality will not be shown when working on a mobile device
  • All edit windows (Instruction, User Guide and Course), the settings window and the feedback window are not supported on a mobile device. A user who, by accident, got to such a window, will be informed.

Editors working in the SelfGuide Recorder might face the scenario that the mobile interface is shown. Generally, this happens when the Recorder window is too small and the editor will be informed about the situation. On a Microsoft surface device, the tablet mode can also be the cause and needs to be disabled in the system tray to be able to work with the Recorder. The informative message has been expanded on to account for this scenario.

Inform editor before starting the Recorder

The Recorder will be started when images and actions are needed for one or more steps, for example in the Add Step and Create Recording functionality. The Add Step functionality was the only place where the editor is informed about the Recorder being started. Editors, especially when new to using SelfGuide, often got confused and did not understand what was happening. Additionally, it was possible for the first few steps not to be recorded if the editor started clicking too quickly.

To inform and explain the behavior to the editor, a modal has been added to all functionality that starts the Recorder. To overcome the possibility of missing the first steps, a delay has also been added to give the Recorder time to start in the background.

Note: the delayed start requires updating the SelfGuide Recorder to version 143. Download the newest version on https://www.selfguide.com/downloads

Safari browser support

The performed changes to make SelfGuide mobile responsive also solved the last remaining issues when working with SelfGuide in a Safari browser. We are happy to announce that from this moment on, working with SelfGuide in a Safari browser is supported.

French language support

French language support is added for those users who have French as their default browser language. To summarize, SelfGuide is now available in 4 languages: English, Dutch, German and French.

UX improvements

  • The styling of tiles (for instructions, user guides and courses) has been improved and now the entire tile is clickable instead of only the title
  • Annotation is renamed to note to simplify the terminology
  • In the Dutch translation, Recording is now consistently translated to Opname
  • A new select component is introduced in the Instruction property modal for tags, applications and the owner
  • In the feedback modal the new select component has also been introduced to select the category

Bugfixes

  • The path to content was lost from the URL when using the 'Continue as guest' option on the login window
  • Step removal led to an error when saving the instruction and the step did not exist anymore. This scenario has been made optimistic and will not throw an error anymore