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.
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.
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".