Request for user feedback: Just-In-Time Advice

Question

An ongoing debate within LabVIEW R&D needs some more customer input in order to be resolved.
In LV7.0, we added Just-In-Time Advice dialogs (aka JIT dialogs). Those
are the small dialogs that you see when, for example, you drop a
stacked sequence structure and you are informed about the new flat
sequence structure. See the attached image for an example.  We
were terrified of introducing something always in your face and getting
a response like Microsoft's Clippy, but we wanted a way to tell
customers, particularly upgrade customers, about things that had
changed and improved ways of using old features. The advice dialogs
really aren't targeted at new users, since for them, everything is new.
We need to know if we succeeded and whether or not the design of those
diialogs should be changed. Only a few customers have ever given
feedback about the JIT dialogs. That feedback has been fairly off-hand
such as, "I'm glad that particular dialog was there to help me." But we
really don't have information about whether the dialogs would be more
helpful or less if some of their UI aspects changed. The problem we're
having is that we in LabVIEW R&D wipe our .ini files frequently as
we test new versions, so the JIT dialogs are always popping up. This
makes a lot of developers want to change or remove the JIT dialogs
entirely. So we need a clear picture of whether or not this feature is
helpful to our users.
Please think about times you have seen the JIT dialogs and whether you
were annoyed by them, helped by them, etc, and reply to this message
with your experiences. Separately, I'll post some of the reasons why we
made the JIT dialogs behave the way they do. But I'd first like to hear
some customer feedback with out the biasing, pro or con, that an
explanation might have.
--- Stephen Mercer
-= LabVIEW R&D =-
Attachments:
JIT_Advice_Screenshot.png ‏12 KB

Answer 1

I think it is a good feature, but I'd like to make some suggestions.
1) When the dialog pops up (like your attachment), it would be nice if I could tell it right then that I don't care about that advice. Right now you have to click on the link and then say you don't want the advice in the future. I think it is that extra step that is really annoying. I think, like most people, my instinct is to just close the dialog. Then next time I run LabVIEW I have to deal with it again. After the 5th time dismissing the damn thing I turn it off.
2) It would be nice to have an easy way to turn JIT advice off for a particular session. For example, I'm called on to help get new employees up to speed in LabVIEW. When I sit down at their computer to help design/debug things, I would really like to turn off JIT advice but just for my session. I don't want to change the other persons settings.
3) It would also be nice to be able to turn off JIT advice without going to the options.
So, I guess what I would like is this. When the JIT advice dialog comes up, instead of only having the link to the advice I'd like to see some a button that will turn off this topic in the future, a button that will turn it off for this session of LabVIEW and a button that will turn JIT off for good (with a verification dialog).
So, experience programmers with a new install will just turn it off for good the first time it pops up. Experience programmers on someone else's machine can turn it off without messing up the other persons ini file and I can leave it on when LV8 comes out and just dismiss the old advice quickly as it comes up.
Pat