[Foundation-l] correcting a big usability problem

[Ben Yates]

A couple months ago, there was a formal usability test of wikipedia;
it turned up a few problems, one of which stood out as both severe and
easy to fix.

Quote from the pdf, minus graphics --
http://openusability.org/download.php/89/germanwikipedia_usabilitytest_edit.pdf
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Two users who started their first-time editing with a paragraph
instead of the whole page
were not confused by the syntax. However, they were faced another
problem: The location
of the "Edit" links seemed to relate them with the paragraph above,
not the one below.
Therefore, when clicking the "Edit" link below "Geschichte", they
expected to see the
heading "Geschichte" and its contents.

This expectation was not met, instead "Weblinks" appeared in the
editor window. They
were confused, did not know what to do. Finally, both participants
deleted (!) the existing
and valid text, and started to add their own text.
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