An update from the Wikipedia Usability Initiative – the team working to streamline and simplify the editing experience on Wikipedia.

You asked and we listened.  In an effort to be comprehensible in many languages, the Usability Initiative’s beta toolbar used the letter “A” for character formatting icons.  In our recent release, we updated the toolbar to use language-specific icons (for example, “B” for Bold and “I” for Italic in English and “F” for Fettdruck and “K” for Kursiv in German).  These have been created by Hannes Tank using the free Droid Serif font by Ascender, which has an extensive character set, contains over 43,000 glyphs, and continues to grow.

We, unfortunately, cannot create all of the icons that are needed for all the languages and wikis out there.  We need your help!  Let’s collaborate!  To help you help us, we have created this “How To” guide to walk you through the steps to create these icons and get them on Wikimedia Commons.  If you use a language wiki that does not have language-specific icons already on Commons, and have basic knowledge of Inkscape + Gimp (open-source illustration and photo editing tools) or Adobe Illustrator + Photoshop, we welcome your contributions.  To incorporate these into your language wiki, you need to have administrator privileges.  If you have sufficient privileges, please see our description of the technical implementation here.  If you don’t, please get in touch with a local administrator for the wiki in questions.  We encourage you to discuss within your language community to determine which letter or icon is right for you.  Thank you in advance for your participation and contributions – we couldn’t do it without you.

Do you have thoughts and opinions on going language specific?  Please share!  Do you have questions or suggestions for improvements on our How To?  Please leave them on the discussion page.

Parul Vora, Wikipedia Usability Initiative

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative partnered with Bolt Peters and Davis Research to evaluate the changes we’ve implemented so far and inform our work moving forward.  If you don’t know what changes we are talking about, check out our Beta (including a new skin, new toolbar, improved search, and more) by following these instructions.

Overall, the study confirmed that we are on the right track with our beta features – showing us room for improvements, maybe a bug or two along the way, and work yet to be done!  You can view the full report (and soon the full videos) on our project wiki, but we thought we’d share with you some highlights:

Success

“It was easy, and I wouldn’t have thought it would be that easy.”

“Before there were a lot of tools, and I liked that they were all spread out in front of you, but this actually makes a lot of sense. I had to muddle my way through the older system, but this one seemed fine.”

“Websites don’t have common sense, but programmers do.”

The majority of our 8 interview subjects found and used our features and tools without instruction and with success.  Special victories go to our more spacious and grouped tabbed navigation, improved search and new searchbox location, and built-in toolbar.  In using these features, users were not only less intimidated, but also showed a greater ease of use and increased performance.  All of the 8 users successfully found the “edit” tab with a minimum of hunting; no one resorted to Google to get to the Wikipedia article they were seeking; two of our users even expressed pleasure and delight in the process!  Perhaps small victories, but a major change from our first study if you remember!

Needs Improvement

“Uh-oh, I think I may have made the wrong kind of link before. I’ll go to the preview window to see if this is a link. It would have been nice to just edit it in the preview.”

“This is different, it’s got these hot-links [the table of contents]. That’s nice.”

“Links are so easy to screw up. I’m not sure if we’ve correctly typed the link markup. Ah, there are these buttons…”

Some of our tools are definitely still rough around the edges – their flaws and failures were seen in technicolor when observing people using them.  Our link dialog caused the most confusion.  6 of our 8 users initially made some errors in using it, and some received a false positive assurance when they had not actually accomplished the link behavior they were attempting.  Oops!  Our features need to err on the side of a user’s expectation rather than giving users access to the technical structure or wiki syntax, which they did not in this case.  For example, to create a new link in our prototype, users were asked to specify whether they wanted to create an “external link” (to a website) or “internal” link (to a different article) – a differentiation that exists in wiki code, but not in the eyes of a novice user.  Additionally, our toolbar buttons need to behave consistently and be grouped accordingly.  Having dialogs for links and tables, and not having one for a reference was not acceptable and led to some quite confused and persistent button pushing by our subjects.

Speaking of buttons, our “Bold” and “Italics” toolbar buttons use the roman character “a” – the result of our struggled effort to be accessible to an international community while attempting to take advantage of software standards.  In our effort to generalize, we became too general – even those users who correctly guessed the purpose of these buttons had to hover over or use them to confirm their assumptions.  We’re going all in – look out for our efforts to make our toolbar icons language specific soon!

As if we didn’t already know it – adding media or “embedding a file” was the least understood toolbar action of our study.  Most users avoided it, but when they did the sample text that it inserted provided no additional insight.

Moving Forward

“I’m completely intimidated by that [template].”

“I’m not sure what that is. I’m going to save it and then see, because this preview is too confusing.”

Our study illustrated how large an effect a small change can have and brought to our attention tweaks and enhancements that need to be made to our current features.  It also showed us that we are just a slice of what is a very, very large pie.  We had many deja vu moments seeing users flounder around previewing and saving, many times adopting strange techniques and multiple windows to add a simple sentence.  The terms “code,” “computer lingo,” “html” often came up and highlighted the separation users feel from their content while editing.  The expectation for editing a wiki to be similar to editing a blog or word processing document was still prevalent.  And though our Table of Contents and built-in cheat sheet put out some small fires, when navigating an lengthy article or searching for help, we again heard “there sure is a lot of stuff to read” and “this is where I’d give up.”

As we’ve mentioned before, we cannot tackle the full scope of issues that our study participants surface.  But I think I can speak for our team when I say we all felt a certain amount of satisfaction in the results of those problems we did address and it has only made us more eager to attack new problems and iterate on solutions we’ve proposed.  As always, we look forward to your comments, insights, and feedback!  We also appreciate your contributions during our fundraiser – it’s in part community support like this that makes the Foundation’s work possible.

Parul Vora + the Wikimedia Usability Initiative

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to try the new skin ‘Vector‘ that the Usability Team has implemented as part of our first release, also known as Acai!  If you haven’t yet, we invite you to check it out by going to Appearance > Skin in your preferences and selecting ‘Vector’.  As you play with the new skin and enhanced toolbar, the Usability Team is looking forward to our next release – codename Babaco – the next alphabetical tropical fruit in what we expect to be a delicious series.

We hope to continue adding features to enhance the editing process – including but not limited to further toolbar enhancements; dialogs for the creation of links, tables, and references; and tools to aid in navigation of article content during editing.  Our research, design, and development depends on feedback from users, community members, and interested parties like you.  We invite you to take a look at our work and if you have any opinions, praise, concerns, or criticism, please let us know here.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Parul Vora, Wikimedia Usability Initiative

The Wikipedia Usability Team has finished up their analysis of the User Experience and Usability Testing conducted this past March with Bolt | Peters!  As noted, please expect a full report on our project page soon.  While we are getting all of our i’s dotted and t’s crossed, we wanted to share with you some of the major themes and findings & successes and failures.

Outstanding

“Usually it’s the most information in the easiest spot to access.  It always looks very well put together….it boggles my mind how many people can contribute and it still looks like an encyclopedia.” – ‘Galen’
“I like Wikipedia because it’s plain text and nothing flashes” – ‘Claudia’
“It’s always one of the first hits on Google” – ‘Grace’

If there was one thing that was consistent and unanimous across our study participants, it was the assessment that Wikipedia is an incredibly valuable information resource whose accessibility is unparalleled.  Aside from its value as a reference, a time and lifesaver, and an up to the minute news resource, participants also praised it’s simplicity, coherence, and breadth.  Also, an extra thanks to Google, for showcasing just how referenced Wikipedia articles are – consistently making their links one of the top hits – our users count on that!

Room for Improvement

“Rather than making a mess, I’d rather take some time to figure out how to do it right.” – ‘Dan’
“Where are the rules?……I don’t really want to read all of this other stuff about what I”m supposed to do.” – ‘Grace’

All of our participants are Wikipedia readers, but had little or no experience with editing.  Generally the editing process was not a warm and welcoming one.  Before subjects even hit the ‘edit’ or ‘edit this page’ buttons, they voiced concerns about the rules, proper etiquette, formatting, and were naturally conscientious of and inhibited by maintaining the community expectations.  When a few of them attempted to find answers to their questions about rules and etiquette, they were overwhelmed with the amount of information and documentation they encountered.

“ [I felt] kind of stupid.” – ‘Galen’
“It looks all jumbled and crazy…I’m going down to the stuff that looks like it makes sense.” – ‘Tito’
“I’m not a programmer.  I know the letters PHP.” – ‘Seamus’

Once within the editing environment, most subjects commented on the illegibility of the hybrid Wiki syntax and article content – the more complex the article, the more exaggerated the response.  When users made it past their initial reactions, navigating around the syntax to perform basic word processing tasks (correcting a typo, inserting a block of text, bold and italics formatting) proved less problematic than finding a particular section, adding references, using tables, creating and naming links.  But not even our youngest and most computer savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease.

“It’d be nice to have a GUI, so you could see what you’re editing.  You’ve made these changes and you’re looking at it, and you don’t know how it’s going to look on the page.  It’s a little clumsy to see how it’s going to look.” – ‘Bryan’
“On a blog it looks like the real page when you look at it.  I have a hard time looking at this and going back to the way it actually is.  I’m trying to correlate what’s on the real page.” – ‘Saurab’

Aside from feeling confused by the “code”, “computer lingo”, and “html”, subjects could not correlate what they were seeing within the edit box to what they saw on the article page.  Most subjects opened a separate browser window to view the static article as they were making their changes and used preview and save before they had finished their work to monitor their editing progress and results.

Fail

“[This is] where I’d give up.”  – ‘Shaun’
“ There sure is a lot of stuff to read.” – ‘Dan’

Yes, we can admit it.  In some ways it seems, we are failing our users.  The tasks that users most often failed to accomplish were adding references, creating a new article, and successfully finding help.  When adding references, users questioned where and how to enter their sources.  Once they established a location, they struggled with both the interface and the complex wiki syntax.  Several users, while scanning pages to try to figure out how to create a new article, saw ‘create a book’ and thought “add a wiki page” was what they were looking for.  In both adding references and new articles, some users consulted help.  Help proved to be quite a labyrinth, where the cheat sheet was one source of shining light.

Check out this highlight video (in English only for now) on Commons:
Editing Wikipedia Makes Me Feel Stupid
Explain the Editing Process to Me
I Can’t Tell What This Really Looks Like

Though we cannot tackle the full scope of issues that our study participants brought up, brought to our attention, and validated, it was an eye-opening and learning experience for the whole team.  The study informs us as we take a further look at the most effective changes we can make to lower these barriers for potential Wikipedia editors.  We look forward to sharing our complete report and initial ideas with you – stay tuned!

Parul, Wikimedia Usability Initiative