Explore using hints with getting started

[miguelsolorio]

We explored these in the early days of the onboarding flow and wanted to bring this back to explore to see if using it with Getting Started will help make the path clearer for the user or when an action is not needed.

[digitarald]

Other use cases on top of UI tours (chaining hints together) that recently came up:

1. Replace onboarding notifications with a ephemeral hints on important UI elements.
   • Notebooks pointing to kernel switcher in status bar
   • Opening untitled file could highlight the language switcher
2. Replace error notifications with hints on the interactive UI element, until the OK button on hint or the element is clicked.
   • Python pointing to interpreter switcher when no default or a problematic kernel was set
3. Replace extension recommendation notifications with a hint + counter on the extension activity bar
   • Important extension recommendations
   • Workspace extensions "Do you want to install the recommend extensions for this repository" should not show up on startup #121802

@misolori should we keep iterating in this issue or file separate issues for chained vs one and done hints? The UX for them should be very similar overall.

[miguelsolorio]

I think keeping them together makes sense here since one would have a CTA of "Done" and the other would be "Next" with a counter.

[digitarald]

Edge DevTools had this elaborate technique to highlight elements: https://medium.com/web-on-the-edge/how-we-built-the-devtools-tooltips-4e9933abbd8a . As we guide users through panels, this might be interesting, but also not much of an improvement compared to just having a hint with a pointer on the right element. A nice animation, like a circle blip on the
element, could also be enough to guide attention and something we can experiment with.

[JacksonKearl]

This is very much not a convex hull.

[miguelsolorio]

Here's a few variations I drew up this week:

[daviddossett]

Closing this in favor of discussion in #165846