“Unless you write like this, with no carriage returns between your lines.
Personally I find that a bit odd. But is it normal for some users? This certainly does not look correct to me.”
MANY people write like this. (And especially non computer interested people.)
I hate that too. But a theory could be that in books and magazines there normaly are no blank lines beetween paragraphs.
In case of books there are text-indentations, but in magazines often even that is missing. You are supposed to get the paragraph by noting the new line and the most often shorter lengh of the line before - strange.
I think that the system should work like most users write. Most users don’t put lines between paragraphs. Having a database full of comments from the last year, you might be able to extract some statistics…
Looks like the overwhelming opinion is change the way the SO editor works, just think how bad it would have been if these sites weren’t designed for techies.
You train the user to ignore the sidebar, as I find myself doing on all the trilogy sites. I don’t care to see your ads, so I don’t look in the sidebar. I find myself ignoring the sidebar on many sites, because that’s a common place for advertisements. The trilogy sites specifically put ads on many of the pages, most importantly the main page, right where you want them to look on the Ask Question page. Why are there no ads there on the Ask Question page? Your UI is inconsistent in this manner. I expect to find ads there, since you have trained me to expect them in the sidebar by placing them there on your main page and other pages.
I’ve only read the first 20 or so comments, but I’m going to join the chorus who say that a WYSIWYG editor would have been the right choice here - and worse, I’m whipping out those 4 awful words:
I told you so!
I was the guy who gave you the ‘don’t make me think’ comment on the SO blog, way back when you were choosing Markdown. You replied that the preview would be right below the user’s entered text, so it would be ok. I didn’t want to turn into That Endless Comment Debate guy, so I left it there.
But the truth is, in your ‘what the user sees’ screenshot, you should’ve blocked out everything but the text entry box. That’s what the user really sees - his brain is busy enough, formulating a question that encapsulates what he knows about his issue. He shouldn’t have to be mentally reconciling what he types over here what what is shown over there.
Also keep in mind, you are proud to give yourself and your coder colleagues large displays with great resolution. Not all of the SO/SF/SU users will have as much screen space. It’s entirely possible that they won’t even have their browser window large enough to see the Markdown preview at all!
WYSIWYG solves all of this. I see you still defending Markdown, in your article and in your replies to comments. I see you wanting to find some way to put formatting help directly in the user’s view - but this is still a defense of Markdown, which is many things but it is not WYSIWYG.
Jeff, you’re very perceptive of user issues and foibles, and I’ve learned a lot from reading your thoughtful and entertaining posts. SO/SF/SU are awesome in so many ways, because you and the team have been so willing to roll up your sleeves, tear off the usual dev blinders, and really think about the user POV. It’s therefore odd (to me) that you still have this WYSIWYG blind spot!
One issue with the preview of outpt is that it is yet another big area directly under the big text box area. When i’m here at work and have my laptop docked that isn’t a huge issue. When I’m working from the laptop screen though the two areas are just too big to view so I go with what I know - I typed it in - it probably worked fine.
I imagine that the answer to your problem is to put the stuff you want users to read exactly where they look. You’ve already marked it on the last screenshot.
Do you use some kind of mechanism to bucket-test new UI ideas?
don’t take it the hard way, but nobody reads all the text. Not even you, that is. You’re just better at guessing what’ll be the general message anywhere and you probably have a better memory of what was where on a site/class of sites. This is why pictures work well, and formatting does a lot. Using formatting it is possible to convey the ‘message’ of an area without requiring anyone to actually read it… unless…
I absolutely agree with you that users will read only the bare minimum that they need to and ignore everything else. However, I completely disagree that this issue is the reason why people are having trouble with this form.
The real issue is that the formatted post does not exactly match what the user typed in. Whether or not the user should put an extra space between paragraphs is irrelevant; the fact is that they are typing something in and it is NOT coming out exactly the same on the other end.
You’re asking users to adjust their personal habits/preferences so that they align with your system. That’s backwards. Your system should respect the fact that users don’t necessarily WANT to follow your specific conventions. You’re burdening them with extra work that’s completely unrelated to why they’re at your site in the first place. That’s the problem.
By and large, people are stupid. It’s not only that they WON’T read; a lot of them simply can’t read very well. Nor can they write.
I have a Preview button on my comments - almost no one uses it.
My solution: any CR gets translated to a BR. If they know how to use PRE, B, I and other simple tags, I let them. If not, very simple text is what they get.
I still run across users who don’t grok “word-wrap”. This may not be entirely their fault, as it’s still not ubitquitous in places like e-mail and Notepad, but if something as simple as that isn’t easy enough that users are putting explicit carriage returns at tend of every line, then this problem isn’t going to be solved by user-education.
Remember the Microsoft paperclip? Clippy was supposed to watch user behavior and when it noticed something that the user was doing inefficiently, it would offer a helpful tip in a very obvious animated in your face way.
This worked wonders for the users that were in need of education, and it annoyed the hell out of users who didn’t need it, or didn’t want education.
Good luck, but be careful about re-inventing Clippy.
You example and the implementation suck. It’s a What You See is Not What You Get.
There are paragraph breaks in the text the user types, but they mysteriously disappear in the final text. Unlike in this comment BTW.
You could do the slashdot thing and force users to preview before posting. However, I am not 100% sure a user who has their post mangled in this fashion will know that they need to enter an add’l cr in order to get it to show up correctly.
I think there’s a Meta-rule of UI design, before fancy features and making people read directions (which, true, is hard): UI is most successful when it does just what you expect, with NO need for prompts. That is a very hard-to-acheive but Zen-like state. A new user simply starts using a system and says, “Oh, ok. I get it.” And they are right, and they use it correctly.
It seems to follow that if I type plain ol’ unformatted text into a site that is explicitly designed for the SIMPLEST possible data entry, that the default behaviour would be that the result looks just exactly like what I typed. Call it the “duh” principle. Type, click save. After that principle is satisfied, THEN add extra possibilities around optional formatting.
