User:Ttibot~usabilitywiki

From Wikimedia Usability Initiative

Hi,

I'm an user experience designer, animating in my free time on the Experience Design Wiki develompent for the design community. We have think long on mediawiki usability so we can share about it.

Have a nice day

Thibaut

project sites (en)
Forge (we do not really use the forge since we have not enough programmers, yet it makes a good project show)
Technical prototype (work in progress, we are currently programming the new skin)
project sites (fr)
Development blog
contact
designwikisurvey[at]gmail.com

Observations on MediaWiki usability

I apologize for my bad English. All of this content is summary of observations maid during the design wiki project. It is not exhaustive and concentrating on points that seems to have a strong impact on usability. It can and must be criticized !

Returns of experience gathered

  • Wikis seems to have a strong reputation of being complicated to use. For example Google didn't want to use the wiki word for his jotspot based wikis, calling it "Google sites". We also faced a lot to this problematic speaking of making a wiki, and had to promise to make an effort on usability to get support.
  • People dealing with usability problems generally have to use learning to deal with it.
    • Learning is bad for newcomers, most would just get away, ohers will does as they can with no learning willing, and a few will learn. The fact is that it does not depends on what the person have to say, but on his computer skills. Some will say that it depends on motivation and makes a good filter, but once again, motivation is not linked with the quality of the content (it may even be the inverse). People have to be able to make a first step easily in the contribution system to become then contributors.
    • Learning can be good for community integration. Learning give the sentiment to be part of community, may also make people happy to use what they have learned. So having learning necessity at advanced contribution level is not necessarily bad.

Main tips

  • Main problem seems to be the lack of visual editor. Even if wikicode is easy to catch with a little effort, it restricts the use of MediaWiki for people not used with computer who are just affraid of it.
  • Usability of community tools seems to need to be really improved. According to Don Tapscott researches, community tools needs to meet the community needs to help it grow. Having a real forum, friendly talkpages, friendly user pages, even some social tools like social profile, should help a lot the community to grow.
  • The simplicity of global first seen interface architecture seems to be not to bad at first sight. Except a lot of links on the left side. The main referents of a site navigation are supposed to be top horizontal bar and left vertical navigation bar. Using top navigation bar referent for "edit" links greatly make the "contributive" aspect on light. Visibility can be questioned (I feel ok with it but I had some surprises with a few people not understanding where to contribute).
  • Internal links in content seems to be a greatly appreciated, so does the "see also" part.
  • The "technical" appearance of Wikipedia makes some people happy to think that there is nothing unusefull such as decoration, all is functionalities. Yet this sort of thing generally have a strong impact on usability. The site perception is turned to technical, making the people not used to using technology afraid and just thinking that they will not be able to use it, then they make less effort.

Recommendations

  • Concentrating efforts on WYSIWYG editor development. FCKeditor seems to be not bad, yet usability workshops on templates integration on FCK would be nice according to me.
  • Making an effort to put less links on the main bars, hiding non widely used links under menus for example.
  • Working on community tools such as forum, social profile...
  • Making an effort on graphisms semiotics (sens) to help people to think it can be easy to use and being confident.
  • Having a non-computer aware people thinking. Ask support from ergonomes and user experience designers. Usability for newcomers could be turned on a "zero learning" objective.
  • Making surveys on people that does not contribute on wikipedia and asking them why they do not contribute. If some have tried/had in the idea to do it, it cold be good to ask questions on usability barriers. The ones we have gathered is wiki code (many many time), then people not understanding the interface.

Books selection

Here are my own recommendations for an easy library.

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