New Feature: The Tips Box

Happy Tuesday! We decided to celebrate this beautiful second day of the working week by rolling out a new feature.

When you create and edit Hubs, you will now see the occasional tip to the right of your screen – right below the Add a Capsule box and right above the box where you reorder capsules and change settings.

The tips in this box are shown to you based on your HubPages experience level, the sorts of capsules you are using, and topics on which you are writing.  To get more information from each tip, simply click on the question mark to the right and a lightbox filled with helpful information will pop up over your capsules.

Also rolling out with the tip box are occasional warnings, which, if triggered, will appear below the tip box as you are editing things in the HubTool.  These warnings exist to help you steer clear of any problems with publication (e.g. they’

 

ll help to point out banned links and pixelated images).  Think of them as a rather advanced evolution of spell-check 😀

With occasional help from Paul Deeds, Edward Zhang built this awesome new feature, and has generously agreed to take some time to chat with us about the work he has done:

HubPages: Where did the idea for adding a tips box come from?

Edward Zhang: The original plan was to create some sort of message about the Summary box in edit mode. We wanted to bring attention to the summary box so that Hubbers know to write their own original summaries to better promote their Hubs (as opposed to relying on the auto summary option that we used to have).

From that idea, Paul Deeds then suggested that we can turn this idea into a more broad tips box, which we could potentially use to provide some neat tips and advice for Hubbers, as well as show the current warnings in the Hubs. As a result, we ended up building the two boxes, Tips and Warning.

What is your favorite feature of the tips box?

Personally I think that (and hope that) the Warnings box will a tremendous help for Hubbers, as it aims to provide real-time warnings as they edit their Hubs. I hope that it would be much easier for Hubbers to see their Warnings before they finish editing, rather than having to go back into their Hub to re-edit after they finish making all their changes.

What was the hardest detail to build?

It’s funny how this project started out as such a simple idea, and expanded to be such a huge project. The hardest part of the Tips design would probably be the coordination that was needed in order to refine the details of the design. In order to brainstorm tips, we needed to plan out a meeting with Jason, Ren, and our dear Simone. For the design of the tips box, I had to seek advice James (our genius Graphics Designer) and Paul Deeds, where our design of the box(es) evolved over the course of 2 weeks. All in all, although I was the one who coded the Tips, this project turned out to be a collaborative effort of a huge part of the HP team.

Can people hide tips?

Hubbers can choose to minimize their tips box by clicking on the little arrow next to the heading Tips.

Warnings however, cannot be removed, as we believe that it’s important to let our Hubbers know what kind of warnings they are receiving. We hope this will save hubbers the time and effort having to go back and re-edit their hubs after they have finished making their changes.

What sorts of warnings might people see?

The warnings that show up are the exact same warnings that the Hubbers will see in the black box sitting on top of their Hubs. We basically took those warning messages and made them more real-time during edit mode.

What are some cool things about the tip boxes that people might not notice?

A lot of Hubbers may neglect to click on the ? next to each tip, as it can be easily ignored. I strongly encourage Hubbers to click on these ? because it provides more in-depth details about each tip, and can be very helpful to know.

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A big thanks to Edward and Paul for this feature.  Now it is easier than ever to write really great Hubs from the get-go!