UX: Improve AI Lab Recipe usability and discovery

[MariaLeonova]

Is your enhancement related to a problem? Please describe

Improve discovery of using the AI app functionality:

Right now it's not easy to find how to open the actual app UI in browser, I've seen multiple users get stuck in a loop trying to do that. The button to open the AI app is hidden in Running -> Actions menu. There it's still overshadowed by the Start button, which i this case is redundant, as the recipe is already running.

The documentation is good, but it's not super easy to find from the UI: https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop-extension-ai-lab?tab=readme-ov-file#usage

Never in the Summary -> Try the Chat application does it say: press the icon in actions to try application.

All the purple underlined words look like links, but some of them are and some are not. Some links ask to confirm you are leaving the UI, some don't.

There's pod information, but it's not possible to see full string:

Describe the solution you'd like

In order to grow AI Lab adoption, we need to evaluate this UI and the user flow, and make improvements suggestions.

• make it clear how to run start and run the app
• make sure all text makes sense
• make sure all links behave the same way
• find a UI solution to distinguish links from highlighted text

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[axel7083]

Hi @MariaLeonova !

In the Summary tab you have the README file of the recipe, for example for the chatbot application, the readme is from the repository github.com/containers/ai-lab-recipes/blob/main/recipes/natural_language_processing/chatbot/README.md

As this is unique to each recipes, we cannot change much of the content of it to indicate how to start the application.

Links issue

Links need to be absolute links, (E.g. https://example.com/hello-world) some links are relative, like #section-b and therefore are buggy.

We probably have some works on improving this.

Contexts

To give some context, to why do we have a running tab ?

At the begining of Podman AI Lab we had a single button at the top allowing the user to open the application, this was great but was leading to some scaling problem.

We allow users to start multiple recipes (nobody do that but this is a technical possibility), user could create pods manually, do some stuff, leading to the scenario where we have multiple recipes running.

Therefore the running page was here to allow this scaling, and display the potential multiple pods for this recipe.

Workflow

While making this change and having this running tab, we tried to redirect the user to this page after creating an application.

Inside the Start recipe, we have a Open details button once it is started

which redirect to the Running page of the Recipe.

[MariaLeonova]

HI @axel7083! Than you for providing background info on some of the UI details - it's definitely helpful to understand the history. The concerns I raised are still valid, since we can't go after every user and explain why the things are the way they are. There are a few suggestions that I would still like to make to make the experience smoother and more intuitive.

For instance, I don't see an issue with having a Running tab, if anything, after the user has started the recipe, it is probably more important than the recipe Summary.

One could argue that one of the most he most important things might be this button: And, if so, it should gain more visibility. Could there also be an AI App details page, similar to Service Details?

Over the next few days I'd like to go over the UI and make some suggestions, which we can then discuss!

[axel7083]

Could there also be an AI App details page, similar to Service Details?

Yes we had some discussion on this matter (somewhere I can't find an associate issue) but currently we do not have it planed, as we do not have much to show in it

[MariaLeonova]

@axel7083 @slemeur @jeffmaury I have a question about Recipe usage. There's https://podman-desktop.io/docs/ai-lab/start-recipe and https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop-extension-ai-lab?tab=readme-ov-file#usage. Where would be the right place to navigate users to?

And also is creating a model service necessary to open the AI App and use it in browser? Or are these the only pre-requisites?

Prerequisites

- Podman AI Lab installed.
- Model downloaded.

[jeffmaury]

Even model download is not mandatory

[slemeur]

I agree that opening a running instance of the recipe has been getting more complexe. But it is consistent with how Podman Desktop handles it for opening an application running in a container.

Also, when you have already an instance of the recipe running, when you are on this page - there is no way to see it.

For your questions:

There's https://podman-desktop.io/docs/ai-lab/start-recipe and https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop-extension-ai-lab?tab=readme-ov-file#usage. Where would be the right place to navigate users to?

one is the readme of the repository, the other is the documentation. I'd point users to the documentation.

And also is creating a model service necessary to open the AI App and use it in browser? A model service is needed to run the application yes. But if you already have one started for the model you select when starting the recipe - then it will use that model service.

Prerequisites

• Podman AI Lab installed.
• Model downloaded.

When starting a recipe, if you choose a model that is not yet download, the tool will take care of pulling the model. So it's not a pre-requisite.

[axel7083]

If we really want to emphasise with the fact there are something in the Running tab we could add an indicator

Running (1).