Hi, we received a lot of feedback that suggests, that the extension needs some usability improvements if it shall be useful to casual visitors. I ´ll share our thoughts on how to improve the situation and it would be great if you could share yours.
We distinguish two use cases: * Users want to create collections * Users want to share/find collections = Creating collections = The main challenge for most users is to discover this feature at all - as most visitors simply ignore the sidebar. The current solution having a dedicated portlet for the extension labeled "Create book" is the best we could think off so far. We plan to remove all but the "add wiki page" links if users have no active collection. This will save some space in the sidebar making it less obtrusive if users are not interested in creating collections. When compiling collections users are limited to add articles they are visiting (except for categories). We thought it might be beneficial to permit to add articles which are linked on a page without visiting them. The idea is to have an advanced book-creation-mode which allows for easier collection building. It could be activated if users have non- empty collections. Using JS article links could be enhanced to have an "add article" button if users hover them. This mode could be displayed and disabled in a box in the upper right content area. See the following link for a mock-up: http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/raw-attachment/wiki/UsabilityIdeas/mock-up-bb-mode.png We refactored the collection page which now allows to resort articles and chapters using drag and drop. A more fine grained and verbose ajax progress was implemented when documents are generated. As this is not yet updated on Wikibooks - you can always find the latest version of the software running at http://simple.pediapress.com/w/ . = Sharing / Finding collections = The current implementation allows: * saving collections in user or global namespace * all collections are listed in the category collections * manually editing (e.g. adding them to more categories) * direct links to load, or export collections can be created and used on other pages (this needs some documentation though) Still missing is some mechanism to track, describe and promote valuable collections - distinguishing them from those trial or outdated collections that start piling up in the collection category. Maybe one could use ordinary wiki pages ("featured collections") to list good and maintained collections. Collections could also be linked from topic main pages (books, portals, ...). Do you think this will be sufficient or is a more formal and technically supported solution necessary? Please comment and post your thoughts on how to improve the usability? Thanks, Heiko --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mwlib" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mwlib?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
