Hi,
we received a lot of feedback that suggests, that the extension needs some usability improvements if it shall be useful to casual visitors. I ´ll share our thoughts on how to improve the situation and it would be great if you could share yours.
We distinguish two use cases: * Users want to create collections * Users want to share/find collections
= Creating collections =
The main challenge for most users is to discover this feature at all - as most visitors simply ignore the sidebar. The current solution having a dedicated portlet for the extension labeled "Create book" is the best we could think off so far. We plan to remove all but the "add wiki page" links if users have no active collection. This will save some space in the sidebar making it less obtrusive if users are not interested in creating collections.
When compiling collections users are limited to add articles they are visiting (except for categories). We thought it might be beneficial to permit to add articles which are linked on a page without visiting them. The idea is to have an advanced book-creation-mode which allows for easier collection building. It could be activated if users have non- empty collections. Using JS article links could be enhanced to have an "add article" button if users hover them. This mode could be displayed and disabled in a box in the upper right content area. See the following link for a mock-up: http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/raw-attachment/wiki/UsabilityIdeas/mock-up-b...
We refactored the collection page which now allows to resort articles and chapters using drag and drop. A more fine grained and verbose ajax progress was implemented when documents are generated. As this is not yet updated on Wikibooks - you can always find the latest version of the software running at http://simple.pediapress.com/w/ .
= Sharing / Finding collections =
The current implementation allows: * saving collections in user or global namespace * all collections are listed in the category collections * manually editing (e.g. adding them to more categories) * direct links to load, or export collections can be created and used on other pages (this needs some documentation though)
Still missing is some mechanism to track, describe and promote valuable collections - distinguishing them from those trial or outdated collections that start piling up in the collection category.
Maybe one could use ordinary wiki pages ("featured collections") to list good and maintained collections. Collections could also be linked from topic main pages (books, portals, ...). Do you think this will be sufficient or is a more formal and technically supported solution necessary?
Please comment and post your thoughts on how to improve the usability?
Thanks, Heiko
Heiko Hees wrote:
Maybe one could use ordinary wiki pages ("featured collections") to list good and maintained collections. Collections could also be linked from topic main pages (books, portals, ...). Do you think this will be sufficient or is a more formal and technically supported solution necessary?
Please comment and post your thoughts on how to improve the usability?
IMO, Wikibooks should continue using Featured Books. Each book (featured or not) should provide a link to an associated collection. I see the collections feature as completely replacing the "Print version" stuff we had before and which I thought never worked very well in the first place.
To this end, I created a template called [[Collection]], and WK subsequently improved it. It can be placed on the front page of a book and it announces the existence of an associated collection - the thought being that a reader first finds a book that catches his interest using the traditional routes - then discovers that it has an associated collection.
I think it would be great of the "Printable version" link would somehow link to a collection - or at a minimum, create a collection with only that page in it.
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:41 PM, j.w. thomas jthomas@bittware.com wrote:
IMO, Wikibooks should continue using Featured Books. Each book (featured or not) should provide a link to an associated collection. I see the collections feature as completely replacing the "Print version" stuff we had before and which I thought never worked very well in the first place.
You're right Jim, featured books is still the way our community reviews and approves books of a certain quality. However, there is probably also some value in recognizing or even just advertising books with good collections, as opposed to old crufty collections as I am sure we will see in the months ahead. How to resolve this problem, if we resolve it at all, is to be seen. As far as Heiko and PediaPress are concerned though, this is really a community issue and probably not one that can be tackled by them technically.
I also agree with the point about print versions, I think the collections extension is their death knell. The benefit of using collections in the first place is that we can generate things like PDFs that reflect the accurate state of the book. Prior to this extension, PDFs were almost universally out-of-date because they never reflected the most recent versions of the wiki pages. Print versions bridged that gap because through transclusions they were always up-to-date with most recent changes on the wiki and they were (usually) good enough to be printed or converted to a PDF. With the collections extension now, I think this is a lot less necessary then it was. However, print versions still do support some things that the collections extension doesn't yet: user-specifiable page breaks (through some fancy HTML), more precise rendering of HTML/CSS objects, including taking clues from site-wide, per-user, and per-book CSS classes, WYSIWYG printing, because the browser handles the rendering instead of the mwlib parser, etc. If we could get some better formatting in collections in general, or more options to allow the author to direct the layout of their book, we could definitely shut print versions down for good.
To this end, I created a template called [[Collection]], and WK subsequently improved it. It can be placed on the front page of a book and it announces the existence of an associated collection - the thought being that a reader first finds a book that catches his interest using the traditional routes - then discovers that it has an associated collection.
There is still some work to be done on that template, and I want to use some DPL to create lists of books with collections that we could post around, but this is definitely a good start.
I think it would be great of the "Printable version" link would somehow link to a collection - or at a minimum, create a collection with only that page in it.
A little bit of unification between these two features would be nice, yes. Hijacking the "printable version" link in the toolbox to automatically create a PDF of the current page with an attached GFDL notice would definitely be a good thing.
I have plenty more feedback that I am going to post later, but I wanted to reiterate some of the things Jim was talking about here because I think they're all valuable.
--Andrew Whitworth
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