User Onboarding Process

[hunting4code]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
It's currently difficult for non technical users to get setup with the application, as it requires you to add an API.

Describe the solution you'd like
We should add an on boarding process that walks the user on how to setup an anonymous account on e621 and than links to an article we make on how to connect their E6 account.

[clragon]

A rough idea of how I imagine onboarding in general can be found in the beakin project:
https://github.com/clragon/beakin/blob/73f6d1f47d147fb8bde738ebc423e698476a222e/lib/user/widget/create.dart

A slideshow that holds the user's hands for important settings.
We can also take a look at the Onboarding guidelines in the Material Design docs, which have helpful definitions:
https://m2.material.io/design/communication/onboarding.html#usage

Things the onboarding could contain:

• Accounts/Hosts
• Theme
• Home tags
• Grid settings

I only believe the first one to be crucial to the app experiment. The user can also skip it, or perhaps explicitly choose "anonymous" as an account, which allows them to opt out of the tutorial.

Certain onboarding processes have impressive visuals, like image grids scrolling by in the background.
It would be possible for us to construct something like that. We can use live data from specific tags we think would fit. However, this might make us to some degree vulnerable to vandalism or unwanted content showing up there. We could also hardcode assets cropped and compressed form for this purpose.

If we add grid settings to the onboarding process, the background grid could adjust to provide both aesthetics, as well as a preview.

[clragon]

I generally dont believe we should link to external articles (it takes users out of the app experience, which is a No No).

With the PR in e621ng/e621ng#1260 the site will likely soon have multiple API keys. I am considering landing a follow up PR that allows pre-filling the fields in the creation screen, (and maybe redirecting if the name exists already), for a new API key, which would make this process easier for users.

It might be worth thinking about the API key creation flow in additional detail later on, to make the sign up smoother.

[clragon]

It is also possible for users to log into e6 and we "steal" the browser cookie, from our in-app browser, to authenticate.
This is a supported authentication mechanism in the app, but there is no UI to execute it. Another mobile browser, The Wolfs Stash, uses this method of sign up.

We could consider adding this as an alternative to an API key. We already have tech available to open in-app browsers and reading their cookies to resolve cloudflare blockages, so the complexity is bounded.