"It looks much cleaner and less cluttered"
"This will help adoption by new users in my organization."
When we started hearing remarks like these from users trying out our new user interface, we knew we were on the right track.
We wanted to take Socialtext usability to the next level, and it wasn't just about making things pretty. Socialtext's goal is to help people use wikis to turbocharge organizational collaboration. This means helping people get started using wikis; helping novices climb the learning curve to become power users; and helping wiki mentors grow wiki use in their organizations.
Three years of customer feedback had taught us what users wanted at their fingertips, and where they get stuck. The biggest hurdle to overcome is pushing that edit button. People are used to seeing a website as formally published content, not something you dive in and improve. "Edit" needs to be the first thing you see on a page, and the most attractive thing to do.
The motivation to edit, add files, and tag information comes from the desire to share information with colleagues. Wikis have a built-in design pattern that shows flow of the team's work. The "recent changes" view is a shared inbox for a group. Frequent wiki users become "recent changes" addicts. But we found over time that many new wiki users never find the recent changes view. So they miss the social, living nature of a wiki.
The inability to find "recent changes" is a piece of a larger problem -- how to help people find their way around. The heart of a wiki is hypertext links. You're not locked into a fixed hierarchy modeled after physical file cabinets, you can build and evolve your own information architecture. But without a predetermined hierarchy, how to do you find your way around?
To solve these problems, we added a set of tools to help people navigate and organize. These tools gradually accreted around the reading and writing interface, making pages look cluttered and overwhelming to new people, and making the navigation features harder to see.
The answer to both of these problems was to separate the navigation experience from the reading and writing experience. A personal "dashboard" helps orient a new person. "What's new" is easy to see. The shared "bulletin board" (formerly Workspace Navigation) continues to provide a way for team leaders to create signposts for the team. The dashboard also helps power users, by giving them an overview of activity in a busy wiki. And, putting "watch list" next to "what's new" helps newer users figure out what the watch list does.
The dashboard just offers a taste of what's going on in the wiki, and invites the user to dig deeper. When you do dive into the "what's new" or "watch list" view, you can see other ways of browsing information, by tag, file, and other ways. The list view enables users to learn various ways of scanning information in the wiki.
When we started the project, we knew that there were places that users got stuck -- they didn't know to edit a page, they couldn't find recent changes, it was hard to upload a file.
We're not done yet. There are more improvements planned, that will improve the reading and writing experience, that will help people get around and explore; that will help people develop wiki expert practices of wiki gardening and mentorship. I look forward to continuing to serve Socialtext users, to help more people learn wiki skills, make that first edit, and become experts over time.
