User-Generated Tours

[jaredkhan]

Problem Statement

Making OneZoom tours has a high barrier to entry.

• To do so, authors need to commit to the unadvertised OneZoom tours repo with a JSON file describing the tour. The JSON format is not documented in a single place.
• Some contents such as tree location references and image references require background knowledge of how the tree viewer works.
• Even if you have that knowledge, it's not convenient to gather those references.
• To preview a tour, you need to upload it to a OneZoom server, meaning you either need to get in touch with the OneZoom team or make your own instance (which itself is non-trivial).
• In general, the feedback loop is slow.

User Types

• Internal OneZoom tour authors
  • Want a more convenient tour creation workflow
  • These users want access to the full tours runtime feature set. If there are gaps, internal authors will tend to prefer the JSON format
  • Already used to managing tours through the repo
• Internal OneZoom admins
  • Currently have to create user accounts for tour authors
  • Currently have to keep track of which tours have been published
  • When reviewing tours, they currently upload them to the beta server
• Third-parties
  • Less concerned with full tours feature set, more with ease-of-use. Need to be able to create the tours without technical knowledge of how OneZoom works
  • Those that want to contribute public tours
    • Want an easy way to submit tours for publication
  • Those that want to create tours for their private display, such as in a museum
    • Want an easy way to 'install' tours in the museum display of OneZoom
    • We don't consider this user type for now, since museum users are in the minority, and focus instead on the live website use cases

Requirements

• There shall be a visual editor for creating new OneZoom tours
  • There shall be a way to preview your tours without any need for an admin-sanctioned account
  • There shall be a way to preview your tours without uploading them to a OneZoom instance
• There shall be a process for publishing created tours to the public OneZoom site
  • There shall be a process for previewing someone else's tour without making it publicly discoverable (even on beta)
• Casual users shall be able to discover that they can create their own tours

Out-of-scope

• We won't provide a way for museum users to install tours persistently. The museum display doesn't currently have tours at all.

[jaredkhan]

One option for discoverability would be putting a 'Create your own' button in the Tours modal that opens the tour editor.