[xwiki-devs] Feedback from a novice user

Hi devs, Yesterday I’ve asked my wife to try out XWiki... Exercise 1  ========== I gave her the simple task of creating a wiki page with some content to organize a party with a list of people to invite.  Here’s some feedback from this session, in the order she discovered them:  * She started reading the Welcome block (good!) but was puzzled by the terminology of ‘“spaces”. Especially since the English wording said “sorted by spaces”.  —> Improvement: Rephrased with “organized by spaces” + had a one line sentence explaining what a space is. * Then she saw the Spaces list below and started clicking on the existing spaces.  ** First Blog, she understood what it was about and decided that was not where she would put her new page.  ** Then she clicked on Main and after 2 seconds of puzzlement (it didn’t do anything since she was already on the main space) the understood that it was where she was already —> Improvement: Highlight the current space differently in the Spaces list to make it clear on what space the user is currently on ** Then she clicked on Sandbox and understood it was a page to try out stuff after reading the content. She clicked on”Sandbox Test Page 1” and found the edit button and started typing some text and saving the page. It worked fine but she understood that this wan’t her missing since I had asked her to create a new page… * She navigated back to the home page by clicking on the Home menu entry at the top. Actually I was surprised that she used those menus to navigate very quickly and it did not seem to be an issue.  * Then she tried sending a message (don’t ask me why, this wasn’t part of her mission but she wanted to try it out, Strangely she picked the “group” item in the visibility box and then started typing my name. It did print “Group not found” and she understood she had done something wrong but still clicked “share”.  —> Nothing to do IMO here except maybe remove this message section as we discussed already * Then I asked her again to create a new page and she didn’t know how to do that. Then after asking her to look better at the UI she found the “Add” button and clicked “Add Page”. Again the issue with “space”. It was written “Main” and she didn’t fully understand that and started typing here own content in there “anniv MAM !!” and then in the page name she put “liste invités” and clicked create. I’m not sure what happened after (I don’t recall) but she clicked on the space menu entry at the top (which was displaying “anniv MAM !!”) and this led her to the WebHome page with a message saying that the page didn’t exist and she clicked on “edit” in that message to create it. She wondered why it was written “WebHome” in the title field and why she had to type again “liste invités” there but she did it and added content to the page and saved. Then she was surprised to see in the top menu “WebHome”. She didn’t understand that. She was expecting to see “liste invités”.  * Then I asked her to create another page which she did correctly.  * Then she wanted to navigate between the 2 pages she had created but she couldn’t find how. Actually the saw the “My Recent Modifications” panel but told me that this was ok because she had just edited the pages but if that wouldn’t have been the case she wouldn’t be able to navigate. She clicked several times on the menu entries at the top (wiki, space and page level) but never thought about clicking the little arrows there… When I asked her she said she saw those arrows but didn’t think it would do any good clicking them. Actually she told me that she was puzzle by those top menu names. She said she would have preferred to see “Spaces” and “Pages” with the arrows next to them and then she would have clicked on them to see all the spaces and all the pages.  —> We need a simpler way to navigate between pages (either some navigation panel or change the way the top menu works) * Then I asked her to create a link between her 2 pages. She couldn’t imagine how to do that. Then I asked her “what would you do if I asked you to put some of the text you created in bold” and she understood that she had to edit the page…  Exercise 2  ========== The second exercise I gave her was about changing the wiki’s home page to be her own content. I tested it with several options: - option 1: clicking edit on Dashboard.WebHome (XE 6.1) - option 2: clicking edit on Main.WebHome (XE 6.1) - option 3: clicking edit on Main.WebHome but forcing the “inline” mode (XE 6.1) - option 4: clicking edit on Main.WebHome but with the proposal of http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-10586 Results in short: - option 1: She selected the text she wanted to change with the mouse and hit backspace… resulting in navigating to the previous page in the browser. Her rationale: she had clicked edit first so she thought she was in edit mode… - option 2: The WYSIWYG appears, she again selected the text to change and hit backspace… resulting in the whole include macro being removed… Then she didn’t understand what happened… - option 3: The dashboard appears in inline mode but a warning is displayed with technical explanations that confused her and same problem as with option 1 anyway. - option 4: She couldn’t use the first version I did because she didn’t understand why when she clicked edit she wasn’t in the standard edit view (as with other pages she had edited before). I tuned the text leading to http://jira.xwiki.org/secure/attachment/28082/step2.png and thereafter she could use it just fine. Conclusion =========== This was very useful to me. It was worse than I imagined… but I now better understand how newcomers think when they see XWiki. To summarize we need to: - explain the concept of “space” or replace it by “folder” which is an already known concept. - show titles everywhere in the UI instead of page names (this is very confusing for the user): top menu, index livetables, etc - add ways to navigate between pages more easily (either by changing the top level menu or introducing some navigation panels) - there might be something to improve on the top level menu: She saw it as navigation only whereas it’s not fully and thus it’s not obvious that it contains actions that can be done at a given level (because it displays the current position and not generic terms such as “spaces”, “pages”. Thanks -Vincent