In the home view of observable, six items are listed under the section Learn, one of them being Templates.
It seems the template link is an older one, refering to: Observable Templates / Observable | Observable
I think the following is preferrable: Free templates that you can easily customize | Observable
Seems correct to me. The collection’s description is “Learn how to use Observable Templates to quickly & easily create powerful data visualizations.”, and it offers tutorials for specific templates. Those tutorials in turn link to the templates in question.
I looked in more detail and you are right - i guess I was wrong:
I saw how many templates have been provided in the recent weeks and they are located at Templates / Observable.
When I wanted to browse them and went to Learn → Templates, I expected to land on that page. I thought the page Observable / Observable is older and just contains 5 templates - the page I was looking for is still two clicks away.
But you are right. These are not 5 templates, but are five tutorials provided as videos to explain templates…
I don’t know about right and wrong. I haven’t taken the time to work through all the content or to organize suggestions, but my general opinion is that there is now a lot of content, and it’s not super easy to figure out the a starting pathway for new users. Most that I know is from being around for years. I am onboarding new data scientists to Observable these last couple of weeks and have requested exactly this sort of feedback. Thank you for raising it!
In the home view of observable, six items are listed under the section Learn, one of them being Templates.
You mean here, right? (At first I thought you were talking about the top navigation menu, where “Learn” and “Templates” are separate items.)
Yeah. As you and @mootari have described, it’s definitely confusing but not exactly incorrect, lol. We have Templates, and then we have tutorial videos teaching you how to use five of the Templates.
The Templates are notebooks, and the tutorials are YouTube videos embedded inside different notebooks. Both kinds of notebooks are organized with collections, and then fetched from the collections by the frontend to appear in different parts of the UI.
So we are using collections+notebooks as a kind of internal CMS, letting us change the content promoted in the frontend without pushing code or deploying the site. That’s super convenient in some ways and lets us update the homepage, documentation, and other pages a lot faster than we used to.
But it leads to some weirdness like this!! Like, it may seem silly to have both the User Retention template notebook and the User Retention template tutorial notebook (why not just embed the video in the template?!) — but that’s how we get the video listed on In-depth tutorials to help you get started | Observable. (Which is also what you see on your homepage under “Learn”.)
Anyway, the internal reasoning sorta doesn’t matter when it’s a confusing experience. Though I’m not sure there’s a quick fix I could make. At some point, since there are now so many more templates than template tutorials, maybe it’d make sense to fold the five videos into their corresponding main template notebooks, and remove that section from Tutorials. And there are a lot of things we could do to make Observable a better internal CMS. (E.g., we’re using collections like nested folders, but they’re more like flat interconnected tags, and that leads to confusion like every collection being in the same namespace.) At least the next time we redesign these pages we’ll have the benefit of this experience!
