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

[Ian Woollard]

On 08/05/2009, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/8 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
>
>> b) Need more cheat sheet type stuff, in-your-face, practically
>> everywhere. When you create an article and when you edit- you need a
>> cheat sheet showing you how to do stuff, it *seems* to be how most
>> people work. Probably there should be a non blank create template with
>> examples of commented out references and a few headings
>
>
> I have suggested this repeatedly. The usual response has been FIGHT THE
> POWAH!

Well, the wikipedia is big... google is big also.

One of the tricks google use is they try stuff out on victims... I
mean users. They pick a small percentage of the internet and do
something slightly different for them, and see if it works or not. The
advantage of only doing it for a small number is that it means you can
write the test with prototyping tools, rather than having to make it
run fast, and you'll have a lot less complaints if it doesn't work
very well. It also means you can do back-back comparisons stuff like:
'we tried this, and it showed a 23% improvement in referencing'.

I think if at all practical, the wikipedia needs to start doing stuff like that.

> - d.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect
world would be pretty ghastly though.