On 27-Jan-2011, at 0:04, Platonides wrote:
Jan Paul Posma wrote:
I completely missed the "You can edit the article below, by clicking on blue elements in the page." line. Only found after thinking "this needs some kind of notice on how to edit, since it's not clear what to do to change the page...".
in usability testing I also found that people don't read texts like that at all. That's one of the reasons I removed the different edit modes. It was
also clear,
however, that just by moving the mouse over the screen and seeing text being highlighted, there wasn't any need to read that kind of notices, as all users understood the concept very quickly. After that they would search for a save button, and would find the publish button after looking around for a bit.
That's precisely the kind of things you want to find out from a usability study. That's why I reported it, not only to show the world how dumb I am :) My eyes moved from "Awesome, you are editing Wikipedia!" to "Can you briefly describe the changes you're making?" completely missing it on the first scan. Worse, I also wondered for a few seconds where was the edit box.
Haha, yep, that's obviously what's going to happen to current editors with any new interface as radical as this ;)
You need to move the mouse and click to really be sure you're doing it the right way. Having the text about blue elements on a (lighter) blue box may not be a good idea.
Good point! Perhaps a grey or white box with blue outline also fits better in the current Vector design.
A few other improvements: When you open the "line editor" you get the options 'Preview' and 'Cancel'. It's a bit puzzling not having a button to Save, so I would rename the first one to "Change", and maybe delay showing the Publish button until you have done one Change. That needs testing with longer articles, though. Although that would also allow us to reuse the upper space for both telling them to click lines, and -after they discover it- showing the "Remember to press Publish".
The text "Preview" was chosen very specifically to indicate that it will not be saved/published right away, as you might think with "Change". This might prohibit new users from starting to experiment as they fear the changes will instantly be visible. On the other hand, I've had many comments on the "Preview" text from the participants of the usability tests. So in the end I'd rather have a label that is a bit weirder at first, but conveys the message of how the interface works better.
Your suggestion of showing a remember text later is one I've also thought about. However, it doesn't take away the fear of editing at first. Another way to signal to users that their first changes aren't published, is the text When you're done, don't forget to publish the page!", which also indicates that nothing happens before hitting the publish button.
Anyway, I'm not a professional copywriter ;) so yeah, I've heard some good suggestions out there. If you're interested in this kind of "micro" interface design, check out the rationale for the current texts: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JanPaul123/Sentence-level_editing/Prototy... I'm not quite sure if this is something to really think about now or in a later stage of the design (it's still possible that things will change a lot), but it's an interesting discussion nevertheless :)
Jan Paul