SolidOS / SolidOS/mashlib

Login/profile workflow

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#43 3 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
CSS
Stars
70
Forks
31
Avg merge
4h 14m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

Description

I am going to go through the basic login/homepage workflow with the mindframe of an unfamiliar user and try to surface relevant questions.

Step 1
I navigate to kellyo.inrupt.net, which I think of as the location of my Pod. I see this page:

Screen Shot 2019-07-31 at 12 24 07 PM

The "Log Out" button in the upper right indicates to me that I'm already logged in. But then why am I looking at the "public homepage of Kelly OBrien"? If I'm logged in as Kelly OBrien, should I be looking at my private homepage or something? When I login to Facebook or LinkedIn, it doesn't show me my public-facing profile first.

Step 2
I'm new to Solid and trying to figure out what I can do with it, so this "Getting started with Solid and Databrowser button" is most appealing to me. ("Profile" and "Inbox" may be interesting at some point, but I know I don't have a profile or any messages yet, so it's not going to be very interesting. I have no idea what "Public Folder" means.)

I've clicked the "Getting started" button and been redirected to this GitHub page: https://github.com/solid/userguide

That's disappointing! I was hoping to explore, click around and play with a few things to see what's up. I'd rather not read a big user manual. Especially since I don't even have anything I specifically want to do yet. I would be open to a quick guided tour via popups that highlight key features though.

Step 3
OK I've backtracked and decided to check out "Profile" instead. I'm at https://kellyo.inrupt.net/profile/card and looking at this:

Screen Shot 2019-07-31 at 12 35 41 PM

This is pretty ugly and I don't understand most of it. What's a card? What are all these unfamiliar file types? What's with all the random number strings in the bottom left? Why are things like "type" and "participant" repeated?

Is this where I'm supposed to edit my own profile? Or is this the profile others see when the find my Solid Pod?

Step 4
I hover near the "Card" title at the top and get some icons to appear. I click through a few that only deepen the mystery.

Ah, but the "Edit your profile" button looks promising! Click:

Screen Shot 2019-07-31 at 12 43 59 PM

OK great, this is a recognizable page. Looks like there are some basic fields I can use to fill out information about myself. I know I'm on a "public" profile page so I assume anything I type here will be discoverable by other people. (I'm not exactly sure how yet.)

Step 5
Then I scroll down to the bottom of the page and see this:

Screen Shot 2019-07-31 at 12 45 28 PM

That sounds cool. I imagine I'll be able to do more interesting things once I'm connect to other people. I can think of a few other people with Solid WebIDs that I'd be happy to be connected with publicly.

But this instruction confuses me: "Drag people onto the target below to add people."

"Drag people"? From where? I have a friend who I know has a Solid Pod too, but I have no idea what his WebID is... Do I have to go track it down somehow? Or am I supposed to be dragging vcf files from my Mac contacts or something?

Step 6
Because I'm extremely industrious and dedicated, I go elsewhere to track down the WebID for my friend Arne: https://megoth.solid.community/profile/card#me

So now I've got his Profile open in another tab on my browser. I try to drag that browser tab into the other tab that has my own profile open to see if I can drop it onto the target icon. No luck.

Aha, after some clicking and hovering, I've realized that I can grab the little ID card icon from Arne's profile page and drag THAT into the other browser tab in order to drop it onto the target.

This seems to work OK, and now it looks like Arne is added to my list of friends. Though his profile photo is broken.

Screen Shot 2019-07-31 at 12 54 55 PM

This would be a great time to chat him or something to let him know that we're now connected on Solid, but the only icon I see is a little circle with an arrow that just directs me back to his public profile. So I'm not really sure what we can do together.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the six-step login, homepage, profile, and friend-connection workflow at kellyo.inrupt.net, using the linked screenshots as references. Review the Getting started link to solid/userguide and the described profile interactions; done should mean an agreed scope and verifiable improvements for the reported navigation and usability confusion.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
css, javascript, typescript
Domain
design, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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