WARNING: Long post on helping new users.

So I’ve seen what seems like a big influx of new users in this community and we are almost at 1,100 already when 1,000 was reached not even that long ago. I believe Lightning Launcher is going to continue to grow at an increasing faster rate especially with the new script feature that is going to be put in.

With that in mind I’ve been trying to think of ways that will help keep new users as well as attract users that might overlook this launcher or use it once and remove it due to it being geared more towards the tech and customization crowd.

1. First and foremost I wholeheartedly believe that we all need to contribute to the wiki and get it functioning to a point where the most common questions can quickly and easily be answered. That will help with the steep learning curve that LL can bring to new users.

Wiki – http://www.pierrox.net/android/applications/lightning_launcher/wiki/doku.php?id=start

Once that wiki is working up to Pierre’s standards he could even easily put in some menus and a help section that could pull info from that page within the app itself. Helping to aide new users without them having to go out and find the wiki themselves.

2. I have been thinking for awhile that LL should never give up any features to become more accessible to new users. With this in mind I was thinking that with a few early prompts at the start of LL the user could decide what type of functions he/she wants active in the launcher. I was thinking just a basic and advanced setting but maybe three might be needed such as basic, experienced, and advanced. The user would get a brief description of what each would bring to the table and then choose. 

· Basic would function much like that standard launcher and would get rid of things like stop points, panels, scripting, lockscreen, and possibly multiple desktops as this seems to confuse new users quite often. Each item would have prompts explaining how to edit or tweak the options. 

· Experienced would have all options active minus scripting but would still have prompts for quick info and tutorials on items that most launchers don’t have. I will explain more later about the prompts. 

· Advanced would have everything and explain nothing. For those who like to learn by doing and spending hours learning the program.

3. Now the prompts I was talking about in the first section would be full screen information panels that come up whenever a new item is added. The current prompts aren’t as helpful or annoying as they could be and people I think tend to skip right over them out of habit. They would be a few pages long(horizontally scrolled, or by pressing a next button), no more then 3 probably, and explain the item that is being added, how to edit them, etc. That way things like borders on panels would be explained when adding the panel and by making it full screen people can’t skip past it easily without actually reading it and with having a few pages it cant be dismissed as easily either. I was initially thinking the first theme should be a tutorial based theme but with prompts it makes more sense and would be easier and more effective but that doesn’t mean that a tutorial theme couldn’t be of great use to new users.

I had a couple more but they seemed to get rolled in to a few other ideas. I will post more if anything else comes to mind.

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