[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. * I had made the Admin user a simple user. * I later realized that I had forgotten to remove my local cookie on my 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. * Then he said he spotted a bug. The home page had a title of “Home” in 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). Thanks -Vincent
FTR I’ve updated several French translations, see the LT on http://l10n.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/L10N/ I’m trying to update the home page translation but there’s a technical problem (not possible to change the title from l10n ATM). Thanks -Vincent
On 17 Oct 2016, at 10:30, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
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. * I had made the Admin user a simple user. * I later realized that I had forgotten to remove my local cookie on my 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.
* Then he said he spotted a bug. The home page had a title of “Home” in 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).
Thanks -Vincent
Hi, Thanks for the detailed report. On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:30 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
It's because you had the credentials in the browser's cache. Otherwise we ask for them.
* I had made the Admin user a simple user.
XE-1580: Change the user type for the Admin user to 'simple' http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XE-1580
* I later realized that I had forgotten to remove my local cookie on my 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.
XWIKI-6402: Separate Interface language and page language settings. http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-6402
* Then he said he spotted a bug. The home page had a title of “Home” in 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.
We have several inconsistencies for the naming (Indexes, etc.). I agree they are confusing.
* 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.
Not sure about the rubber icon.
* 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.
There are several problems with the bottom horizontal bar for responsiveness and display of panels in mobile mode.
* 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).
So I don't like this idea about the folders. For me is like going backwards to the "Space/Page" separation we had before the Nested Pages. Also the sibling/children separation is strange/'technical'. Thanks, Caty
Thanks -Vincent
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
On 17 Oct 2016, at 12:33, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for the detailed report.
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:30 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
It's because you had the credentials in the browser's cache. Otherwise we ask for them.
This was part of my setup for him. Not sure why you said “because”. There was no question nor problem here :)
* I had made the Admin user a simple user.
XE-1580: Change the user type for the Admin user to 'simple' http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XE-1580
Again this was part of the setup I made so there was no problem about this. However we do have a problem of having the first user be an admin user (see the point about this in my report below), i.e. your first introduction to XWiki is as an admin user, meaning you get to see more options (admin page menu entry, global admin settings) which in this session caused several problems fpr him.
* I later realized that I had forgotten to remove my local cookie on my
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.
XWIKI-6402: Separate Interface language and page language settings. http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-6402
This one seems quite important for newcomers. We should fix XWIKI-6042 ofc. Another idea would be that, on the first run (ie when no admin user is set up yet) we ask about the language(s) of the wiki in the DW. Basically right now there needs to be an admin who set up the languages for the wiki users, before simple users start using the wiki.
* Then he said he spotted a bug. The home page had a title of “Home” in
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.
We have several inconsistencies for the naming (Indexes, etc.). I agree they are confusing.
* 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.
Not sure about the rubber icon.
* 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.
There are several problems with the bottom horizontal bar for responsiveness and display of panels in mobile mode.
* 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).
So I don't like this idea about the folders.
What idea? I don’t remember having mentioned any idea about having folders. Caty it’s not an idea: it’s the way people approach hierarchy nowadays because they’re used to filesystems.
For me is like going backwards to the "Space/Page" separation we had before the Nested Pages.
I didn’t propose anything regarding reinstating spaces or folders so not sure what you’re reacting against, could you be more explicit? That said, the old way was much simpler to understand for users and was causing less friction. They could create spaces and pages. We lost that simplicity and I’m wondering if dropping spaces wasn’t a bad idea (especially since we still have this at the model level). In any case we need to discuss what are our options to make user understands that we have only hierarchical pages and no concept of “folders”. And having some text explanation is definitely not going to work on this (he didn’t even start reading the text of the home page). Thus for me this has to be explained by the UI somehow.
Also the sibling/children separation is strange/'technical’.
The words are technical but the concepts are not because users are used to folders. When you’re inside a folder you can create several files at the same level (that’s siblings) and apparently that’s what he was expecting when he clicked the “+” button (to create pages at the same level in the current “folder”). Thanks -Vincent
Thanks, Caty
Thanks -Vincent
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 2:50 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
On 17 Oct 2016, at 12:33, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for the detailed report.
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:30 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
It's because you had the credentials in the browser's cache. Otherwise we ask for them.
This was part of my setup for him. Not sure why you said “because”. There was no question nor problem here :)
* I had made the Admin user a simple user.
XE-1580: Change the user type for the Admin user to 'simple' http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XE-1580
Again this was part of the setup I made so there was no problem about this.
However we do have a problem of having the first user be an admin user (see the point about this in my report below), i.e. your first introduction to XWiki is as an admin user, meaning you get to see more options (admin page menu entry, global admin settings) which in this session caused several problems fpr him.
* I later realized that I had forgotten to remove my local cookie on my
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.
XWIKI-6402: Separate Interface language and page language settings. http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-6402
This one seems quite important for newcomers. We should fix XWIKI-6042 ofc. Another idea would be that, on the first run (ie when no admin user is set up yet) we ask about the language(s) of the wiki in the DW.
XWIKI-10115: Add the option to choose the language of a new wiki created with the Distribution Wizard http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-10115 XWIKI-11431: Use the language set for the Main Wiki for newly created subwikis http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11431
Basically right now there needs to be an admin who set up the languages for the wiki users, before simple users start using the wiki.
* Then he said he spotted a bug. The home page had a title of “Home” in
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.
We have several inconsistencies for the naming (Indexes, etc.). I agree they are confusing.
* 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.
Not sure about the rubber icon.
* 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.
There are several problems with the bottom horizontal bar for responsiveness and display of panels in mobile mode.
* 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).
So I don't like this idea about the folders.
What idea? I don’t remember having mentioned any idea about having folders. Caty it’s not an idea: it’s the way people approach hierarchy nowadays because they’re used to filesystems.
For me is like going backwards to the "Space/Page" separation we had before the Nested Pages.
I didn’t propose anything regarding reinstating spaces or folders so not sure what you’re reacting against, could you be more explicit?
That said, the old way was much simpler to understand for users and was causing less friction. They could create spaces and pages.
We lost that simplicity and I’m wondering if dropping spaces wasn’t a bad idea (especially since we still have this at the model level).
In any case we need to discuss what are our options to make user understands that we have only hierarchical pages and no concept of “folders”. And having some text explanation is definitely not going to work on this (he didn’t even start reading the text of the home page). Thus for me this has to be explained by the UI somehow.
IMO the tree already helps a lot in helping creating hierarchical structures. Maybe an improvement would be to allow to create pages inside the Tree structure. Thanks, Caty
Also the sibling/children separation is strange/'technical’.
The words are technical but the concepts are not because users are used to folders. When you’re inside a folder you can create several files at the same level (that’s siblings) and apparently that’s what he was expecting when he clicked the “+” button (to create pages at the same level in the current “folder”).
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks, Caty
Thanks -Vincent
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
On 17 Oct 2016, at 14:32, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 2:50 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
On 17 Oct 2016, at 12:33, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for the detailed report.
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:30 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
It's because you had the credentials in the browser's cache. Otherwise we ask for them.
This was part of my setup for him. Not sure why you said “because”. There was no question nor problem here :)
* I had made the Admin user a simple user.
XE-1580: Change the user type for the Admin user to 'simple' http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XE-1580
Again this was part of the setup I made so there was no problem about this.
However we do have a problem of having the first user be an admin user (see the point about this in my report below), i.e. your first introduction to XWiki is as an admin user, meaning you get to see more options (admin page menu entry, global admin settings) which in this session caused several problems fpr him.
* I later realized that I had forgotten to remove my local cookie on my
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.
XWIKI-6402: Separate Interface language and page language settings. http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-6402
This one seems quite important for newcomers. We should fix XWIKI-6042 ofc. Another idea would be that, on the first run (ie when no admin user is set up yet) we ask about the language(s) of the wiki in the DW.
XWIKI-10115: Add the option to choose the language of a new wiki created with the Distribution Wizard http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-10115 XWIKI-11431: Use the language set for the Main Wiki for newly created subwikis http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11431
Basically right now there needs to be an admin who set up the languages for the wiki users, before simple users start using the wiki.
* Then he said he spotted a bug. The home page had a title of “Home” in
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.
We have several inconsistencies for the naming (Indexes, etc.). I agree they are confusing.
* 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.
Not sure about the rubber icon.
* 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.
There are several problems with the bottom horizontal bar for responsiveness and display of panels in mobile mode.
* 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).
So I don't like this idea about the folders.
What idea? I don’t remember having mentioned any idea about having folders. Caty it’s not an idea: it’s the way people approach hierarchy nowadays because they’re used to filesystems.
For me is like going backwards to the "Space/Page" separation we had before the Nested Pages.
I didn’t propose anything regarding reinstating spaces or folders so not sure what you’re reacting against, could you be more explicit?
That said, the old way was much simpler to understand for users and was causing less friction. They could create spaces and pages.
We lost that simplicity and I’m wondering if dropping spaces wasn’t a bad idea (especially since we still have this at the model level).
In any case we need to discuss what are our options to make user understands that we have only hierarchical pages and no concept of “folders”. And having some text explanation is definitely not going to work on this (he didn’t even start reading the text of the home page). Thus for me this has to be explained by the UI somehow.
IMO the tree already helps a lot in helping creating hierarchical structures. Maybe an improvement would be to allow to create pages inside the Tree structure.
That’s http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-12762 (it should be done generically by introducing a macro parameter). Then we could use that in the Navigation Panel tree too. That’s a good idea that could have helped in my session over the weekend (if it’s visible enough). It may not be enough but I think it would help. Thanks -Vincent
Thanks, Caty
Also the sibling/children separation is strange/'technical’.
The words are technical but the concepts are not because users are used to folders. When you’re inside a folder you can create several files at the same level (that’s siblings) and apparently that’s what he was expecting when he clicked the “+” button (to create pages at the same level in the current “folder”).
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks, Caty
Thanks -Vincent
participants (2)
-
Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) -
Vincent Massol