[Foundation-l] Usability Study Results (Sneak Preview)

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> Parul Vora wrote:
>> Thanks for all of the feedback, comments, and support. I just wanted to
>> let you know that our full report (including highlight videos!!) is now
>> up our the Usability Initiative's project wiki:
>>
>> http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/UX_and_Usability_Study
>
> It may be too late for this now, but when I read that "The cheat sheet
> was the only item in the help section that led to a subjects successful
> edit.", I wanted to know how well would people edit if they had the
> printed cheat sheet. Maybe if you have more tests in future you could do
> this - it will tell us exactly what is the value of the printed
> promotional material.
>
> I am wary of this: "Users often missed the ‘edit’ buttons next to each
> section, clicking on ‘edit this page’ all the way at the top." In my
> experience, users do exactly the opposite, and I have seen new users who
> know how to edit sections asking how to edit top section; some
> Wikipedias (f.e. ruwiki) have even added [edit] link to top of the
> article that mimics section edit links. What could be the cause of this
> discrepancy?

About this: on en:wp, at least, under user preferences/gadgets, users
can turn this on themselves by clicking the "Add an [edit] link for
the lead section of a page" box. Is there any particular reason not to
turn this on by default for everyone? Could be (one small) problem
(temporarily) solved.

Regarding this whole discussion in general, and comments made by Brian
(who I respect quite a lot) -- as I understand it, "usability" and HCI
are something of an inexact science. It seems like several approaches
and studies would be helpful, to see if different methods come to more
or less the same conclusions about what's broken, or not.

There are also a number of world-respected HCI experts that are
interested in this community that we could probably draw on for input;
see past Wikimania speaker lists.

-- Phoebe