Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jul 18 2025 at 15:25): Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jul 18 2025 at 15:25):Today in the docs meeting we talked about little popups or tooltips to teach first-time users of Dataverse some of the basics.
Zulip, for example, has cute little whales to show you want to do:
35531652-98616fe0-055d-11e8-8305-28b0bc958561.png
That's from https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/8217
Zulip calls these onboarding steps.
@Oliver Bertuch also found https://www.shepherdjs.dev which does something similar. (Try the demo.)
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Jul 19 2025 at 16:10):Hmm, actually it looks like Zulip took out the whales (and the "hotspots" they were attached to) in https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/30042
They seem to favor one-time modals these days. There are some screenshots in https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/29192
Dieuwertje Bloemen (Jul 22 2025 at 12:31):I think I liked the whales better :whale:
Notification Bot (Jul 22 2025 at 14:16):3 messages were moved from this topic to #community > mascot for Dataverse by Philip Durbin 🚀.
Vaida Plankytė 🎨 (Aug 15 2025 at 12:32):Dieuwertje Bloemen said:
I think I liked the whales better :whale:
heh, i made the whale illustrations during a Google Summer of Code internship back in the day when i was focusing on web development! :smile: what a throwback
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:14):@Vaida Plankytė 🎨 you drew the whales for Zulip?!? :mind:
Vaida Plankytė 🎨 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:23):@Philip Durbin 🚀 sure did, back in 2017! there's a dropbox folder linked from https://gist.github.com/vaidap/83ff59865f199e75ccd1b06607d07bd5 that covers the art i did :smile:
twas fun to figure out how to best communicate concepts like threading as a benefit over email/other platforms:
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:33):/me downloads them all
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:33):Ha! Look at this cutie!
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:34):So sophisticated
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:35):Ha, whale bellhop
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:36):If my dog was a turtle
Vaida Plankytė 🎨 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:39):hehe, it was really fun to have really specific use-cases to design the illustrations around! some of these were used on the (back in the day) new zulip website, while others were for the newsletter flows, and error pages
Vaida Plankytė 🎨 (Aug 15 2025 at 13:40):...i should really put these up on my newly-developed-eleventy site as portfolio pieces :thinking:
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Aug 15 2025 at 14:02):Oh, no! Fail whale but fail octopus! :rofl:
Last updated: Nov 01 2025 at 14:11 UTC