This is an open letter to all the amazing and generous people who make Bubble plugins.
I truly appreciate your effort and time in making Bubble plugins. You make Bubble better for everyone.
However, I want to humbly provide some critical feedback: Bubble plugins are 95% impossible to use because the documentation is sparse, and often non-existent.
I appreciate that many of you are making plugins for your own use, and just making them public because ‘why not’. However, if you’ve spent 5-25 hours making a plugin, by simply taking an extra 0.5-1 hours to write user-friendly documentation you can increase your impact on Bubble dramatically.
It’s like you’ve run 95% of the race, and you just have to run the last 5%. Documentation is not super-easy to produce. Being user-friendly is a challenge, because you know your plugin inside and out, and putting yourself in the shoes of a new person will be hard. However, without doing so, you are condemning your beautiful plugin to the growing graveyard of Bubble plugins that no one will ever actually implement because there is no clear explanation of how it works.
Thank you for considering writing complete user-friendly documentation for your plugins,
I just started to use my first plugin last night - Tagger - and one of my immediate thoughts was “wow, the documentation is sparse here”. I am having to piece it together from various forum posts and demos that I have found all over the place.
Really this stuff needs “easy as falling off a log” documentation if they are to have a chance of going beyond the Bubble diehards.
I agree that some plugin should have better documentation. Actually I’m using the plugin documentation itself to add details on each fields and try to provide different demo that user can also use to better understand how the plugin work.
Don’t hesitate to reach plugin creator to ask more information if needed. Most of the top plugins dev like @seanhoots@levon@gaurav provide good support and will help you do get thing done.
Could you elaborate on what was confusing… The documentation for it is sparse as it just does one / two simple things. The instructions on the page lay these out as:
Honestly @gaurav, those first three lines barely mean anything. It’s difficult to know where to start as you are presumably so close to the topic that it is naturally completely unobvious to you what the problem is, and I am a Bubble relative newbie so it is partly my “fault” plus difficult for me to explain, but let me try.
Extract
A one word instruction is a shaky start. I would say something like, “To install the element that will ‘Extract’ data from text:”
(i) Install the ‘extract’ element on the page
I think you need to make clear that this just needs to go on the page. It doesn’t have to be doing anything - just be there. That had me stumped for ages.
(ii) The source data goes into the input on extractor
I still don’t really know what this means. I guess you mean "The input for the Extractor element is <something (still not clear to me)>.
(iii) The extracted values are accessed as This Extractor’s emails, urls, hashtags, mentions etc.
No idea what that means. Still trying to understand the above.
Mentions
Not even going there yet.
Yours is I think the first non-Bubble Plugin I tried, so maybe this level of documentation is normal. It maybe makes more sense to experiences Bubble people (judging by the comments it does) but for newcomers it is too confusing.
I am sorry to say this, but if you are having trouble with these instructions, then you are going to struggle with some non-plugin functions in bubble too.
Learn the platform first, it will save you a lot of time in the long run.
Again, I would suggest that as someone very experienced in Bubble, it may be non-obvious to you how obscure those instructions are.
I may be a beginner here, but having worked on lots of complicated projects before I have a pretty good feeling for when documentation is good or not (vs when I am just being thick!), regardless of whether I know the platform in-depth already or not.
I’d say overall the Bubble documentation is on the weak side (so not just the plugins), and gives the impression of having been written by people who are in-depth to the platform, so again unaware of how it is to start afresh using Bubble. I’m assuming that is the sort of thing that will change now they have some VC money and can hire some technical writers.
Maybe we can even assume I am the thicko exception here, but @Nocodify seems to run a service teaching or building nocode apps and he says he gave up, so it’s not just me.
We need Bubble to be as widely successful as possible, and I would assume that the way to do that is to really broaden its appeal with “ELI5” instructions!
For me, the tagger plugin was a “nice to have feature.”
If I really needed it, I would spend more time trying to figure it out. I couldn’t understand it the first go around, so I kind of gave up I’m sure I could figure it out if I spent more time on it.
But I do agree with you that most plugins don’t have proper documentation. I also don’t suggest that plugin developers must have documentation… it’s really up to them if they want to take the time to document. @gaurav is the man and I appreciate all he does for the Bubble community.
I completely agree these instructions are very confusing.
There’s actually specific techniques and methodology for how to write support and training documentation, which any school teachers on here will be more than familiar with.
Plugin builders can just google to read up on this, there are interesting tips.
Yes I would completely agree they are confusing and not written for a non code user, but rather interpreted and written as a developer. I see this all the time and clearly if plugin builders can’t see that their instructions are either non existent or confusing then you need to take a look at some of the benchmark help documentation and get some one else with the required expertise to write it for you.
Almost. I think that end user must also do is part to learn the familliar word used in the domain they are. I will not use something else than “Add element on the page” or “Add a workflow” because this is a basic thing of Bubble world. If user don’t know what is an element or a workflow… I think he need to get familiar with Bubble a little bit more before.
I also understand dev that create plugin and make it available for free to not make extensive documentation. However. A minimal instruction to make the plugin usable should be available.
For me “Install the ‘extract’ element on the page” is correct. But ‘The extracted values are accessed as This Extractor’s emails, urls, hashtags, mentions etc.’ may miss a more specific thing like You can access email, url, hastags or mentions in the element state (element state for me is something that end user need to learn to use bubble and plugin).
Nocode doesn’t mean nothing to learn… just no code to learn (and write, and understand…) Bubble user need to learn Bubble first.
It’s the height of arrogance for a developer to argue over whether an instruction is confusing or not when given feedback that it is confusing. If the plugin only does ‘1 or 2’ things, then it won’t take long to humbly update the docs to make it understandable without needing to make any fuss about it.
I’ve worked with Bubble for nearly 3 years and am an ex-front end web developer. The instructions make no sense.
@cowontherun Like I said in my post, I didn’t say it’s perfect. And give an example that for me is correct and what i found is not (personnaly). also, for what I know, @gaurav ask to get more explanation of what is confusing for you (and other) (I believe to update it). This is how I understand this reply.
I’m sure I could figure it out if I spent more time on it.
Bubble user need to learn Bubble first.