Mailing List Archive: correcting a big usability problem

A couple months ago, there was a formal usability test of wikipedia;
it turned up a few problems, one of which stood out as both severe and
easy to fix.

Quote from the pdf, minus graphics --
http://openusability.org/download.php/89/germanwikipedia_usabilitytest_edit.pdf
--

- - - - - - - - - -
Two users who started their first-time editing with a paragraph
instead of the whole page
were not confused by the syntax. However, they were faced another
problem: The location
of the "Edit" links seemed to relate them with the paragraph above,
not the one below.
Therefore, when clicking the "Edit" link below "Geschichte", they
expected to see the
heading "Geschichte" and its contents.

This expectation was not met, instead "Weblinks" appeared in the
editor window. They
were confused, did not know what to do. Finally, both participants
deleted (!) the existing
and valid text, and started to add their own text.
- - - - - - - - - -
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Section editing is certainly counterintuitive for most, especially for
sections more than a paragraph or two longâ€”I invariably edit a section
after I've read it, meaning I have to scroll/page back up for the
link, and I remember it taking a while for me to get used to this.
What's more, the link actually comes before the section heading, so
only a graphical, CSS-enabled browser will display it in anything
approaching a reasonable way.

Although this thread was spawned by the one on site design, MediaWiki
usability really isn't an issue for foundation-l. I'm sure it's of
interest to many here, however, and perhaps it'll result in more
widespread interest in improving it.

Austin
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l