Guiding Speech Bubbles as a service — A good idea?

Mar 31, 2014

The last few years I've been looking around for a little side-project to do — Something that I could call my contribution to the web community. Unfortunately as so many other before me has experienced, creativity and the desire to keep coding, once you've punch out from your 9-to-5, isn't always there ... but now I just might have found that project! So with no further blabbering I would put this out there and I would really appreciate any feedback that you might have.

The "Guiding Speech Bubbles as a service" idea

The main idea is simple and can be seen many places today — To use speech bubbles to introduce and explain your web application.

Remember the last time you signed up for a new service and how you were introduced to the features inside? How about the last Facebook re-design, remember how that was introduced? And what about the new features in the applications you use today?

The fact that it is used so many places today only strengthen my believe in this idea — kinda proven concept already, would you agree?

You can find countless plugins for manually adding speech bubbles to your site, they come in all forms, sizes and colors, with transitions, bells and visuals — You name it they are all there, but you have to implement each and everyone of them you self, and every time you want to change something you would have to do release!

This is where the whole "as a service" come into play. The idea I have in mind would (preferable) only require you to include one external Javascript file — The rest should all be manageable from an administration.

The administration of (all) things ...

In order to able to compete with at least some of the plugins/solutions out there, I suppose quite a lot of tweaking and settings should be possible — Most likely not all my ideas in a first version, but here are some of the main features I've been thinking about.

• Creating a "Bubble"
  
  • Various options should be available here
    • What content should this bubble display?
    • On what URL should this bubble be displayed?
    • Which template should this bubble use?
    • Where should the bubble be positioned?
• Creating a "Bubble Group" (a guide)
  • This feature is about creating a collection of bubbles and determining
    • The order
    • The timing
    • The number of times to display
    • When to display?
      • First/x time visit?
      • On a specific date?
• Enabling feedback
  • The whole idea about using these "bubbles" is often about communicating what your ideas behind a features was and how this features should be used — one-way communication, but does it really have to be? I imagine that one should be able to turn on/off "Give feedback" on a specific bubble.
    Informing the end-users about a feature is a great think, but if they really don't like it or still don't get it, how fare have we really come?
    One should be able to gather information from the actual user of the feature!

Help me out!

What do you think about the idea of implementing a "Guiding Speech Bubbles Service"? Is it anything that you would consider ever using? Is there something I've missed and/or does this service already exist (I haven't been able to find one)?