Re: [xwiki-devs] [Usability] Newbie feedback - Creating pages

Hi devs, Over the weekend I asked my brother in law (who doesn’t anything about XWiki) to test it and give me some feedback. He did this test with me next to him so I could observe and ask him what was going through his head. I’m sending below a summary of the session. We now need to address each point and see what we want to do to improve the situation. The Setup ======== * HSQLDB/Jetty already setup with an Admin user already logged in.

computer and he didn’t have the Tour. Thus I don’t know if he’d have read it till the end of not. * I asked him 2 things only: ** Create some new pages ** Modify the home page The Feedback =========== * First thing he wanted to do was to switch the UI to French (he’s French). He looked for his user profile, found it, and couldn’t find a way to change the language. Fail. I had to tell give him the hint that language was a global wiki-level setting and I had to do it for him. Other feedback: The French translation for the language settings is really not user-friendly and needs to be changed, it’s currently “Localisation”, which is too technical.

French instead of “Accueil”. * He looked around in the UI and at some point he clicked on Page Administration on the home page. This opened a UI with a title of "Administration : Main”. He asked: “what is Main?”. Indeed he was on the home page that was entitled “Home” and suddenly he was shown “Main” which 1/ was in English and 2/ didn’t mean anything to him.

* Then he went on to create a new page and initially was looking for that in the drawer in the Wiki Administration UI… At some point, I had to tell him to stop and I created a simple user for him (that is not Admin so that he couldn’t do in the wiki administration - I should have started with this probably although we need to fix our issue that first time users are admins). Once this was done he was able to quickly find the “+” to create a new page. * However, he wanted to create a structure with a “Domain” folder and some pages inside that folder. He saw the Tree in the Navigation Panel and saw that it was hierarchical and thus he wanted to do the same and create that “Domain” folder first. So he cancelled the Create Page UI since this was about creating a page and he wanted a folder. He then found the “Children Pages” entry in the “More” menu. Note that in French it’s badly labelled as “Enfant de XXX” which was weird to him (FTR it’s also invalid grammatically, missing an “s” for plural) but he understood it was related to children page he suggested “Sous-pages” as a better translation). So he clicked on it and he saw a form displayed (actually it was the filter of the LT UI). And he started typing “Domain” in the text input but nothing happened and he was puzzled. —> When you look at the children LT for a page not having children, you’ll see that we should improve the UI. It doesn’t even say that’s it’s empty and that there are no children pages… * At this point he was a bit stuck and couldn’t understand how to create a folder. I had to tell him that in XWiki you could created hierarchical pages and that there’s no notion of folders (I didn’t want to explain the concept of Spaces especially since he hide this in the UI). He mentioned that after 20 years of Microsoft practice, everyone understands the concept of folders and files and that it’s hard to understand that we only have hierarchical pages. He suggest that we may want to have 2 “+” buttons next to each other (like “+” and “++” or some other visual with a tooltip of “Créer page” and “Créer sous-page"). One to create sibling pages and another one to create children pages). In his head, the default when you create a page is to create a sibling page, not a sub-page.

* After this he was able to create his pages (note that he used immediately the templates we provided for his test and selected the Encyclopedia template). * He noted that the icon for Rename/Move/Delete was weird and he didn’t understand the relationship between the actions and the icon which is the one for settings (the cog). He suggested to use something different like a rubber (which incidentally I see that it’s missing from http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/XWiki+Icon+Set and we need to add it). FYI he was no longer Admin at this point so the “Page Administration” entry wasn’t visible.

* When he edited his first page, he quickly told me that that the “Save” buttons are way too hidden (they’re usually not even visible when you edit if you don’t scroll down). He was expecting them to see them at the top, close to the page menus. He suggested that we should have a horizontal bar that stays always visible when you scroll down and that contains the save buttons.

* At this point he created a hierarchy of pages and then wanted to move some page around to test this feature. However he could find the menu entry to do so. He could easily find the move, copy and delete entries but that’s not what he was looking for. The reason is that the French translation is “Renommer”. On English I see that we’ve now renamed it to "core.menu.rename=Move / Rename”. But the French translation is still “Renommer”. When I suggested to have “Renommer / Déplacer” to him he said that he’d simply call it “Déplacer” since for renaming a page he doesn’t need to go to that screen and he can simply edit the page and change the title. He said it’s fine to leave the ability to change the title on the Move UI but that it was just a nice bonus and not the main goal of this screen in his opinion. * On the Rename UI screen, he started by clicking in the source breadcrumb, and he was surprised that the browser navigated away. Later on he realized that the was a target section. At this point he commented that he expected to see the target first since that’s what he wanted to change. He also suggested that if would be simpler to use if the target breadcrumb was replaced by a Tree to choose the new location. * When he tried to modify the home page he did it very easily and was able to put his own content. When I told him that some user find it difficult to understand that they could modify the home page he said that it’s not the first thing he’d have done. * On the positive side, the navigation panel was really nice for him. He kept using it all the time to navigate. Thus navigation wasn’t an issue for him. That’s it. Hope we can use this to improve basic user experience. The biggest item by far is to make users understand that there’s no folder and that there’s only hierarchical pages. I think I like his idea of the 2 add buttons (create sibling page and create children page), or something similar (I guess the Create UI itself could have a different UI to ask the user clearly if he/she wants to create a sibling or a children page).