On 4 January 2011 19:56, Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote: > The other > reason is that our usability research has shown that collapsing > elements can in fact increase initial newbie confusion as it becomes > harder to make a direct match between the two representation modes > (Ctrl+F for something you're trying to change no longer works).
Yeah. This is why usability testing is *not optional*. Programmers are *regularly* surprised by what actual users do with their creations. Wikipedia already has many productive contributors who are smart, knowledgeable and clueful but basically can't work computers - but can just about cope with wikitext. Imagine if we could get *eight times* the contributor pool, the areas of human experience we could cover if we got in people who were even worse with computers but knew about things other people didn't. > The team is currently focused on finalizing the new ResourceLoader, > which will generally make our front-end code more manageable, as well > as finishing up phase 2 of the article feedback pilot (the little > rating widget showing up on some articles) and ironing out bugs in the > new upload wizard. But as we start into 2011, I'm hopeful that we can > come up with a good development and staging plan for immediate > improvements to the editing interface, as well as a longer term > re-architecting towards rich-text editing which ideally allows for > incremental benefits to be deployed to WMF projects. What are their thoughts on the Wikia WYSIWYG editor? I presume Wikia did usability tests. I don't like the Wikia editor a lot (and find it opaque), but I can cope with wikitext. - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
