So, having played around and tested this: I'm really confused by the X in
the top right and how it fits into common interaction models. Here are the
mental-and-physical steps I went through to reach a state of confusion:
So you open the guided tour by appending ?tour=test to a wikipedia URL;
this pops up the guided tour. I played around with it for a bit, saw that
it was fun and similar-ish to the example I'd seen on
MediaWiki.org a few
weeks/months back, and then went to close it.
The familiar UI element for me to close things is an X in the top right -
and my brain knows that where there's an X, it means 'kill this and don't
show it to me again'. So I hit the X; guided tours go away. I then navigate
to a different page...and that's when the confusion strikes. The guided
tour reappears, only this time without the URL parameter I associate with
'guided tours are on'. Funny, I thought I killed this. Another X; it goes
away again. I go to a third page. It reappears again - without the URL
parameter, having killed it twice. At this point (but only at this point) I
notice "End tour". Tick it, hit okay, everything dies.
That model (End tour) is fine...but it still confused the heck out of me,
and kind of irritated me. My mind interprets an X in the top right, as
said, with 'kill this'. To have it then reappear is a bit frustrating.
X-equals-kill is fairly standard on the Windows platform at least, and I
worry that this may lead to some user frustration; not frustration that
would appear in user tests, unfortunately, where people (ime) tend to study
the interface fairly intensively, but in day-to-day,
trying-to-get-shit-done-fast browsing. If a guided tour pops up, people are
going to be *consciously* focusing on the text and *unconsciously* focusing
on UI elements - and those that are most familiar, like the X, will stick
out the most.[1]
It seems to make more sense to either remove X entirely, or, if it
represents a valid use case, move that use case to something different and
have the X represent "kill this" (as is standard in a lot of other
interfaces).
[1] internally-consistent-but-uneducated argument. May be bollocks.
On 1 February 2013 00:08, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
[For new folks to this list: we regularly make
announcements about the
weekly software deployments by features teams, especially the editor
engagement group.]
First up, Matt Flaschen deployed a new extension which I'm very excited
about: Guided Tour. There will be a blog post tomorrow, but for an idea of
what it's all about, see the project page at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours or visit
https://en.wikipedia.org?tour=test to see a meta-tour. (There are some
redlinks we're still filling in there).
Next updates for Guided Tour are to deploy outside of English Wikipedia -
likely French, German, and Dutch first - and enable an automatic tour for
all users who accept tasks at Special:GettingStarted. You can see it by
visiting one of those articles while logged in, and appending
?tour=gettingstarted.
Associated with this change, we updated several other extensions. In
particular, we removed the orange tooltip which points new editors to the
MoodBar feature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_editor_feedback MoodBar is a
great feature, but the tooltip first appeared when you viewed the edit
window. We do want to make sure newbies know they can leave feedback via
that feature, but we don't want to interrupt people who've clicked edit,
especially for the first time.
Last but not least: congrats to Matt for deploying a ton of work. Adding a
new extension and updating four others is no small feat.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation