19 May
2016
19 May
'16
2 p.m.
On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 2:21 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
The desire here is to present what XWiki can be used for. Our current
getting started is good (the screenshots need updating) but in general it
present the main UI areas. These could be part of the tour also. There is
an overlapping for the tour and the concepts part / usages / steps which we
will need to make some proposals / iterations.
Thanks for your comments,
Caty
Hi Caty,
Thanks for starting this interesting thread! :)
See below
playground.xwiki.org is not relevant in this case since users can't edit
Main.WebHome that contains the Dashboard. Regarding the data to show
problems with the Dashboard we have some old usability recordings videos,
but nothing recently.
On 19 May 2016, at 13:00, Ecaterina Moraru
(Valica) <valicac(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
I'll summarize some ideas gathered from other XWiki SAS employees:
1. Instead of being a Dashboard, the homepage could be a plain wiki
page. This would help the newcomers easily edit it.
I’m ambivalent on this one. I can see pros and cons of both approaches and
I’m not sure which one is best so I think we just need to experiment.
I have a stupid question: do we have data to show that users are having a
problem with the home page? We have mouseflow recording on
playground.xwiki.org. Could you share some analysis of them that would
demonstrate the problems?
My analysis:
Dashboard-style page:
A) + Nicer first look
B) - Less easy to understand that it can be modified
C) - Less information about what the user can do on his freshly installed
wiki
Note that to address B) I had developed this HomePage Application that I
put as an external extension so that people could try it out:
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Home+Page+Application
I’ve never received much feedback on it so I don’t know if it was a good
idea or not. My goal, if I had received lots of positive feedback, would
have been to propose to integrate it by default in XWiki.
To address C) we’ve already discussed about having a Tour in XWiki (it’s
even already in the roadmap for XWiki 8.2).
Note that the Tour could also explain that the home page can be modified
as part of its last step for example, and how to do that.
Wiki-style page:
A) + Can contain more explanations about what the user can do in his wiki
B) + Simpler to understand that the page can edited.
C- - Less polished/finished L&F
I’m fine to test wiki-style as an experiment if we think it would help BUT
we need to define a way to measure how it helps so that we can draw a
conclusion. Because for all I know we could make the home page worse by
doing so too :)
Any idea how to measure that?
Locally we don't have any way to measure it.
2. We could remove some of the applications
listed in the AppBar for
Administrator, in order to feel less cluttered. Invitation, Scheduler
were
the most mentioned apps, especially since some
users don't find them
polished or useful enough. Also User Index is present also in the
Drawer.
I've created this issue for this idea
http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-13433
Note: This is not just about the home page since the appbar is visible for
all pages.
I’m fine but I strongly believe we need to add an Application Index when
we do so or it’ll just be a pain to navigate to installed apps.
3. There were mentions that the default content
should help the user
understand what XWiki is about. This is somehow related to the point 1
and
with the idea of extending the
"Welcome" gadget to contain more
complete /
helpful information. People mentioned also
having videos about XWiki or
Getting started steps.
I’m not convinced that we should bundle videos in the distribution. We
could have them on youtube and stream them but that won’t work in
environment with no internet connectivity. I think I’d prefer to just have
links to videos that would be available on xwiki.org in a getting started
page.
Generally speaking don’t you think a simple link to a getting started page
is enough (as we have now), and we’d just need to improve that getting
started page?
4. Not really related to the homepage, but
related to 3 was the
availability of multiple templates options in the create step, letting
the
users understand what kind of pages they can
create. We already have an
issue for the Blog app http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-13376 .
Maybe
you have other ideas of bundled / other apps we
should provide
templates
for.
Yes, I also believe that each app that allows creating content should
offer a template.
5. Many people said that they don't find
the "Send Message" gadget to
be
relevant enough to be on the Homepage and they
would want it removed.
This
issue is somehow related to 1. If we were to
change the Homepage to be
a
wiki page, than they will not see this gadget
anymore. I've created
http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-13432 but we still need to think if
we want to remove it also from Dashboard or 1. will fix the problem.
+1 to remove it from the home page. Note that we don’t need a wiki page to
remove it. If people don’t find it useful on the home page then I don’t
think they’ll find it more useful to have it on the dashboard page. So +1
to remove it altogether since I myself, have never used this feature.
Would be interesting to know from our users here, if anyone has ever used
this feature! Please step forward if you have! :)
6. Multiple people said that they would want
also to have the Tree part
of the panels area, maybe replacing the Appbar or in addition to it.
The
opinions are mixed since some consider the
breadcrumb to be enough or
others are concerned that the Tree is not a scalable element.
The breadcrumb is certainly not enough without more clue that it exists.
The Tour could help. The advantage of the breacrumb is that it frees up
spaces for having other panels.
In general my opinion is that it depends what you want your wiki to be. If
your wiki is a knowledge base then I’m sure you prefer having it on the
left panel instead of the apps list.
So I’d do 2 flavors by default in XWiki:
* Workgroup Collaboration flavor with Apps panel on the left
* Knowledge Base flavor with Navigation panel on the left
7. Related to the Appbar people mentioned that
the order changes
depending on the language and is alphabetical. They would prefer to
have a
manual order assigned by the administrator. We
have
http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-13075 for this use case.
ok.
Let’s get this started. We need to act ASAP on this so please reply
quickly if you have comments/ideas.
Thanks
-Vincent
Let me know what you think about these ideas and
maybe you have more.
Thanks,
Caty
On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 7:18 AM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <
valicac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to gather your ideas about how we could simplify the
Homepage
> of XWiki Enterprise.
> - Maybe is something that doesn't make sense to have on it?
> - Maybe is something that is missing?
>
> Thanks,
> Caty
>
> Interaction Designer on behalf of XWiki Development Team
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