Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. How better to decide where to improve the documentation needs improvement than to watch some novice users try to do a few of the basics, see where they had problems and work on the documentation to ease them through their difficulties. So I have recruited some victims... er... volunteers who I thought might be reasonable candidates for my experiment. All of them are daily computer users. All of them are well educated with at least a bachelors degree from well regarded universities and colleges. None of them have ever done any programming or serious modifications of a computer program. All of them know what the word macro meant in context. They seem the sort of individuals who might try a program based on the recommendation of a friend or colleague. They are quintessentially the sort of person we would like to see adopting TiddlyWiki in greater numbers.
And the task I picked seemed simple enough. 1. Download an empty Tiddlywiki file and get it working on your computer. 2. Create two tiddlers. 3. Enhance the text in some manner; underlining, italicising or bolding. 4. Create a link between the two tiddlers. 5. Change the title of the wiki. 6. Save their new Wiki. I wanted them to do this with minimal intervention on my part so I could see what a novice user without an experienced user at hand would experience. It all seemed so reasonable and simple at the time. Then I had my session with the first experimental subject, G, and the results were both illuminating and discouraging at the same time. G was able to find the Tiddlywiki site and got as far as starting the download process but got no further before they became frustrated to the point of quitting. The pop-up screen read "*You have chosen to open: b4430791-9e6d-4eea-b1cd-f1b075462833 which is: Firefox HTML Document (1.2 MB) from blob:*" My test subject responded, "That wasn't what I wanted to download. I wanted Tiddlywiki.html or Empty.html. What is this blob nonsense? Something has gone wrong." They cancelled the first download and tried again but got a similar bit of gibberish. G was about to give up when I intervened for the first time suggesting that they go ahead and save the file. Of course, the file G got had a name that bore no resemblance to the gibberish that had been on the screen and G was uncertain if that was really the file they wanted but with some encouragement (intervention #2), opened the file and saw the "GettingStarted" tiddler. The next task, create two tiddlers proved equally discouraging. G found the plus (+) sign but again struggled almost immediately. G attempted to name the tiddler by entering text in the search window, the enter a Tag Name slot and the Field Name slot. G then went on to enter a few words in the space labelled "Type the text for this tiddler." Since G had left the TiddlyWiki site in favor of the new empty wiki, they were uncertain of what to do next and clicked on the plus sign and thus started to create "New Tiddler 1" which would also contain just a few words. G was completely lost about what to do next and went back to the TiddlyWiki site. Returning to the new Empty wiki, G clicked the tick button... I assume the British name for that character is "tick" and not "check" but since it had a picture of it, G had no problem clicking on it and creating two tiddlers "New Tiddler" and "New Tiddler 1." The two tiddlers collapsed to normal size for tiddlers containing a grand total of six words. G saw that the GettingStarted tiddler said "Save changes using the 'download' button in the sidebar." After a bit of searching, G eventually discovered that although there was no button labelled "download," there was one with the help text labelled "save changes." G clicked that and shortly thereafter discovered that they had not installed TiddlyFox and thus everything they had done was lost. It was at this point that G gave up once and for all. Without my presence, G would never have gotten that far before quitting so it seems reasonable to assume that a user of G's calibre, college educated with an advanced degree, experienced computer user, would not end up adopting TiddlyWiki without a lot of hand-holding by an experienced user. G never made it as far as the documentation so it would not have mattered how good the documentation was. After we called a halt to the experiment, G asked why anyone would bother with this amount of effort. What would it do? I stepped G through some of the sites linked in the Community Tiddler, an exercise that took more effort than I would have guessed... and after showing G a few of the possibilities, Dave's Obadiah, Alberto academic wiki, the baby journal... the response I got can best be described as a less than enthusiastic "hmm." Like I said, I was discouraged. We would have lost this potential user very early in the procedure. A few suggestions seem obvious: 1. Get away from the current download mechanism to one that downloads a file with the expected name. Getting one with an apparently random name is confusing at best. 2. Add the words "This is a tiddler" to the current GettingStarted tiddler. That would be a clear indication of what the program means when it says "Create a New Tiddler." 3. For Beginners at least, we need a version of the empty wiki that isn't quite so empty. I recommend we include a version of the GettingStarted tiddler so that the novice can be reminded of the required addins, etc. I also recommend "Formatting in WikiText" and the Community tiddlers. Experienced users know how to delete that handful of tiddlers and new users need them convenient so perhaps we should add them to the single empty wiki. 4. Add a placeholder that says "Search" for the sidebar search space. 5. Use the term "New Tiddler Title" instead of "New Tiddler" as a cue to the new user where to put the title. 6. Add an instruction on how to save the new tiddler on the current GettingStarted after the line "Create new tiddlers using the 'plus' button in the sidebar". 7. Change the line "Save changes using the 'download' button in the sidebar" to refer to a 'Save Changes' since we don't have a 'download' button I have lined up three more test subjects. I'll keep you appraised. Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
