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Vangogh, many thanks for trying the program and posting those comments. That will definitely help improving the application for everyone's benefits.
To summarize your remarks, most of them can read as 'it took me time to figure out how to ...'. So, as you suggested, effort must be put on the documentation.
Certainly the first point to be emphasized is that the extension has 2 levels of usage:
A- for people who want to generate charts out of existing chartlets.
B- for people who want to create their own chartlets because they have specific needs and the knowledge to do so.
From my perspective, i'd say that a good A/B ratio would be 1/20.
People from group A, the large majority, should not have to read 'regular expression' or 'xpath' anywhere, nor even understand what a variable can be. That should just be fields to fill in which are generally obvious: if you want to get the ranking of a site, it makes a lot of sense that you have to specify the search engine query and the site you are interested in.
People from group B are supposed to understand well the basics and should be able to dig into the documentation to figure out the details about how to create their own extraction patterns. I also plan to add to the site a forum for chartlet developers where tips and tricks can be shared.
I believe the most confusing thing in the current version is the embedded help. As it is easily accessible, users tend to click on it and as the embedded help mixes up groups A and B concerns, that raises more questions than it brings answers.
About the existing features, you are absolutely right about the way to start the extension, i must add an entry to the 'Tools' menu.
Also, another thing i find lacking is the capability to start a chartlet execution with a form submit. This will allow to extract data out of sites that require form authentication as an initial step. For instance, in one of my sites, i use 'ShareASale' as affiliation manager, but their reporting system is quite bad and do not display any chart. However, the Chartlet extension in its first version does not allow to go through the 'ShareASale' authentication page.
So, from the first users feedback, my plan for improving the product/service is that one:
1 - write a short introduction page to explain the very basic concepts: install existing chartlet, create channel, run chartlet, display chart
2 - review the basic tutorial, making sure the user can follow a path leading to its first chart
3 - add an entry to the tools menu to start the chartlets window
4 - embedded help will be disabled by default
5 - add a button to load the basic documentation page from the site
6 - add the starting form stuff to expand the scope of the extension
7 - add a forum into the site for people to share their experience on the extension
Thanks again for your contribution.
/mig
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