Confusion with "complete your proposal"

[vmbrasseur]

We use OSEM for SeaGL.

Last year we had a LOT of questions from proposers about the "Complete your proposal" widget on their submissions page:

Clicking the "Complete your proposal" text does nothing (but that could be because the example I'm using is from a closed CFP). Regardless, upon clicking it it's unclear what steps need to be completed. Furthermore, some of the incomplete tasks are unused by our event:

This has led to a lot of confusion and we would like to avoid that. We encourage new speakers to submit talks and this sort of thing really undermines their confidence. Plus it's a bit of a drag on volunteers, who have to answer the same "don't worry about it" questions over and over.

What can we do here? Are there options to disable this or are code changes needed, or…?

Any help would be much appreciated. 😄

[differentreality]

Hey @vmbrasseur
The proposal tooltip is currently hard coded, https://github.com/openSUSE/osem/blob/master/app/views/proposals/index.html.haml#L76

We have found this to be useful for speakers registering to the conference, and speakers submitting their biography, which is in our opinion is necessary to properly review a proposal, and to properly present it once accepted.

I assume the only 2 things that are not mandatory for you are the ones shown above? (Subtitle, which I admit could be optional, and commercial?)
Commercial, is a link to material of the session like a video or slides, so it is something to be uploaded after the session has taken place.

From your experience from seagl, how can this tooltip become more useful and less confusing?

[differentreality]

By the way, clicking on the tooltip even after the cfp is closed, should be working just fine. Perhaps @vmbrasseur it's another issue if you can't see it?

[vmbrasseur]

@differentreality Perhaps it's something with our installation? I'm afraid I don't have the information or access to answer that.

The tooltip isn't the problem. The existence of the "Complete your proposal" widget at all is. We just don't use some of the items in the list, so having the widget there causes questions much more than it solves problems for us.

Perhaps the answer is to allow administrators to define which items are required for a CFP proposal? Then folks can turn off the "required" items which they don't need.

[cycomachead]

This is an old issue, but I just disabled this for my installation.

• in Safari the tooltip trigger click doesn't work -- apparently this is a jQuery/boostrap bug that's annoying to work around on the 3.x line.
• For us many users thought we wouldn't accept their proposal is everything wasn't complete. A few people found it confusing to know where to go.
• Commercials (which I have renamed to "materials") were also confusing for many of our submitters, and don't really apply.
• Subtitles are fine, but seem optional for us. (And really we should just should those on the main submission form.)

[hennevogel]

BTW we have moved this out of the submission cycle exactly to be more inviting and making the submission process more friendly 😄

I guess this is more a color/wording issue than anything else. Enhance your proposal... and a yellow progress bar might be a better way to convey what we want.

[AndrewKvalheim]

Enhance your proposal... and a yellow progress bar might be a better way to convey what we want.

I think something like this would address most of our issues with the checklist if it was clear that the suggestions are optional and might not apply to every proposal.

Confusion around commercials is still a broader problem for us since we don’t use them at all, but I think this too might be addressable with a few wording changes. (e.g. “No video of the event yet, sorry!” is misleading)

[AndrewKvalheim]

Related: #2322