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/Protot…
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