Something I've found is that often the problems that prevent beginners from progressing are the same, or closely related, to the pitfalls that impact the experienced users. So going to the experienced users and asking them what's slowing them down can be a very good place to start - address that, with a focus on beginners as well, and you serve both with the same fix. Experienced users feel that their needs have been addressed and that they were actually included in the process (because they were!), beginners have an easier thing to work with, and the path from beginner to experienced is also facilitated because there's no split.

This is something we've tried to apply to CollaborationKit, an extension intended to simplify the creation and maintenance costs of WikiProjects, which you can see an example of here: https://wpx.wmflabs.org/w/index.php/WPX:WikiProject_Women_scientists (a recreation of an existing wikiproject on the english wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_scientists).
Click on 'manage hub' and instead of a page with wikitext and a bunch of templates, just edit a form, with the content on subpages. All the templating is handled for the users, so even if they do know how to deal with them, they don't need to. We're still working on testing, and a bit between segments of development at the moment, so who knows how well it works in practice, but yeah. That's what we have so far.

-I

On 06/04/17 08:32, Jan Dittrich wrote:
Hello Design List,

One challenge I have in my daily work is combining the needs of beginners and "function experts", people who are used to a specific function/UI.

The "experts" are used to a specific UI and don't like to see changes (for understandable reasons, even if the current UI has quirks, they are used to the current state and would have costs of relearning)

On the other hand, we know that some functions/UIs are really hard to grasp for non-experts. This could be new members of the community, but it could also be established members of the community who touch a function only from time to time ("perpetuate intermediates", as Cooper says in "About Face") and/or who transition into a new role (Editor becomes Admin and has now new functions to use) – which I find important to mention, since it breaks the "experts" vs. "noobs" narrative.

I wonder if you have any practices or examples that show how our UIs can be made easy to get for beginners, efficient for experts and build and introduced them a way that ensures that those who know an existing UI feel it is worth to adapt to changes.

Kind Regards,
 Jan

--
Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ User Research

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de

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