Consider automatically closing the help panel if auto-opened and user creates annotations

[acelaya]

The first time a user logs-in, we automatically display the sidebar's help panel.

We have seen people who never close it afterwards, and just continue working, creating annotations and interacting with the document, with it opened forever.

This panel is intended to explain how to create an annotation, a highlight, a reply, etc., so we could just automatically close it once we have detected the user has started to do those things.

Considerations

• It could be the user is following those instructions, so maybe closing it after an annotation is created (step 1) could be inconvenient, if the user still intended to do the other steps. Adding a few-minutes delay could be a good way to work around this.
• Closing the help panel might need to be an obvious action, so that it's clear the intention is "we see you don't need this anymore, so we are closing it. Feel free to open it again if needed". For this the close animation might need to be slightly slower, and ideally we should highlight the ? button somehow, via a brief flash or similar.

[robertknight]

We have seen people who never close it afterwards, and just continue working, creating annotations and interacting with the document, with it opened forever.

Is this actually causing a perceived problem for the users (as in, they report they want to close it but can't see how), or does it just look wrong to us?

[acelaya]

We have seen people who never close it afterwards, and just continue working, creating annotations and interacting with the document, with it opened forever.

Is this actually causing a perceived problem for the users (as in, they report they want to close it but can't see how), or does it just look wrong to us?

I think it's the latter. I'm not aware of anyone complaining.