oh and
Also, for those of you complaining about the WYSIWYG rich editors
No one complains about WYSIWYG editors. I see some complaining about the lack thereof.
Furthermore many are complaining about your complaining about the users. Isn’t that who you are serving? I don’t see the users complaining about having to go through hoopos when all they want to do is type a question up.
Stop complaining?
You claim that this guy didn’t put an extra newline between paragraphs, but he did put one before the last paragraph. The list is an extension of the first paragraph, which leads directly into it. It makes sense to tack the list on to the end like that.
I hope you’re still reading all those comments. 
This isn’t a problem with markdown. Markdown works equally fine for people who haven’t even heard of it yet and advanced users. When creating a community it’s better to have a little bit more advanced tools than tools that aren’t as powerful as they should be.
The main problem is that those people don’t care about the community. They’ve just googled for “programming question site” and found stackoverflow. They don’t bother to read the FAQ or the help. They’ll move on to another site just as quickly as they came.
This is pretty obvious if you look at those questions. They usually don’t have a proper question as the title but something along the line of “Help, I’m stuck with a problem!” More often than not the body isn’t in a good shape either: One big blob of text, exclamation marks sprinkled over the text and English that’s worse than one can expect even from a non-native speaker. There are no excuses for using teh, plz, u and other slang expressions.
The sad news is: there isn’t much you can do about them. They won’t start caring about your site. Don’t try to persuade them. What might help is the close-reason “Question of too low quality.” (Many people just close them as “Not a real question”.) Maybe even allowing custom soft-close reasons which let the author of the question reopen the question by editing it.
Maybe trying to ignore them and give the community tools to handle those cases quickly is the best way to go.
Hurrah, someone hit the nail on the head:
“If I am otherwise NOT using ANY markdown, the system STILL mangles my post because it applies markdown 100% of the time, even if I have no clue what markdown is or, alternately, even if I know what it is but I don’t want to apply any markdown transformation.”
Exactly.
The issue is not with having to learn code to do fancy formatting. The issue is with writing with basic, elemental, stuff-that-five-year-olds-can-do formatting - ie spaces and carriage returns - and then having that ripped up and turned ito junk by the formatting engine.
And can we drop this daft notion that WYSIWYG inherently means fancy styling. Notepad is WYSIWYG and it works fine for writing short messages.
So make the text entry box behave in a way users expect. They’re not stupid really, it’s just that they don’t differentiate between MS Word’s text entry system or this white box I am typing into, or anywhere else they have to enter information.
It’s a box, you type in it. There is a certain expectation that the text will look like this when I save it and see it again.
If the user is required to type formatting junk into the text entry box, they won’t bother.
Remember - the people asking for help are often busy, in the middle of an important task that they can no longer complete and under pressure to complete that task. The last thing they want to think about is formatting text; it’s hard enough wording a highly specific problem as a generic query that other people can help with.
Echoing what other’s have said… as soon as you put advertising in that right column, you can no longer put anything useful there. The right column == advertising. The whole thing. It’s not your space anymore.
I don’t think the issue here is about users not reading or not seeing the instructions right there in front of them. I think it’s a more serious issue, and if you spent any time on forums, Youtube, or Myspace, or any site which lets users customize things, you would see the real problem: users don’t care what their content looks like.
The average user simply does not care what their post, video, profile page, or whatever, actually looks like, and you can shove previews down their throats all you want - they simply do not care. Most forum posts are unreadable, full of misspellings, formatting problems, lack of paragraphs, capital letters, and punctuation. Most videos are unwatchable, often posted with no editing at all. Most Myspace pages are impossible to read. It’s almost as if the user never even looked at their content after they posted it! Oh wait… yup, that’s what happens.
BTW, I would suggest removing the Far Side comic… Gary Larson is known for defending his copyright, and he seems to be immune to the Streisand effect. That is why it’s nearly impossible to find the Far Side on the net anywhere.
Asynchronous animation might help draw the attention of the user. If, after the page has loaded, or after the user begins typing, the formatting reference div were to fade in, then his attention is drawn there.
Still, if the user simply doesn’t care, there’s not much to be done about that
Lot of good comments here. A lot… so someone may have said this earlier.
One of the lessons I’ve learned through a lot of hard experience is:
Do not trust users to do anything.
It’s a step further than what Jeff stated: “… users will only read the absolute minimum amount of text on the screen necessary to complete their task.”
My experience states that: “… users will only DO the absolute minimum necessary to complete their task, whether it’s reading, clicking, discovery, experimentation… anything.”
Whatever “it” is, I always try to just DO it for the user.
If there are any steps a user needs to take, remove them.
Or do it automatically.
Or walk them through it using simple words, as if you’re talking to a small child (but without implying that they’re idiots, of course).
Don’t assume sophisticated users aren’t prone to bouts of idiocy. They (read: We) are.
So perhaps in this case, a solution would be: make it a WYSIWYG editor. (Redmine actually has a good one that also allows for and other “non-standard” bits.) Have a button that allows users to toggle between the WYSIWYG editor and the standard Markdown editor w/ live preview.
This is a classic case of a user interface that sucks. You type one thing and it turns it into trash. Why would I look at the preview if I am not trying to do any formatting? Why would I expect to HAVE to look at the preview?
No.
The problem here is a formatting engine that gets in the way.
Rip that stupid thing right out, replace \r\n with HTML line breaks, and you’re done.
The user is always right. If you, as a programmer, put in something that is unexpected by the user, even though you put notices in green on hot pink, it’s still your fault for not creating something that the users will naturally use correctly.
I ask the same question again: Why the f*ck would you expect me, the user, to double check my formatting if I have not added any formatting code? It is assumed that my formatting does not need double checking since I put in no formatting codes into my prose.
This is something that I’ve wondered on all sorts of generally well designed sites - why not have your input box exactly the same as what you are expecting to come out? Same font size, same width, etc.
This message box has significantly less width than the area for comments above it - so I have absolutely no clue what it will look like when it hits the line breaks.
Even the “WYSIWYG” editors don’t give you the same thing you entered if the parameters of the input box aren’t exactly the same as what you get out of it.
On a slightly separate note (and similar to your previous posts about the worst code being your own), I find it somewhat entertaining that you can write about poor usability and trying to force users to do things your way, and then go ahead and do all the things that you are complaining about. Reminds me of myself, and based on this article I’m going to go change the input of one of the programs I’m developing right now.
I completely screwed up the formatting on one of my first answers on StackOverflow for a reason similar to the myopia that Jeff described. But it was not entirely my fault. I was running the NoScript add-on for Firefox, which I had told to allow stackoverflow.com. Unfortunately, it was still blocking googleapis.com and with that blocked I was not even shown the real-time preview or the formatting buttons. The Formatting Reference was there, but there’s no “Preview Post” button, so I didn’t know if my formatting was working or not (It wasn’t).
Now, I may not be a typical user, but NoScript is used commonly enough that some sort of warning that the real-time preview was disabled sure would have been nice.
My point is, while user myopia is VERY real (an I’m as guilty of it as anyone) StackOverflow simply didn’t show me what I needed to see.
On the other hand, Jeff, you and your team have created one of my new favorite web-sites. I’m visiting there almost every day, even if I’m not posting questions or answers. Keep up the good work.
I should note, by the way, that if there were no Markdown, and the user’s question were to be posted to the site exactly as he wrote it, monospaced font, single linefeeds and all - that too would be WYSIWYG.
Personally I want some formatting options (bold, italic, bullets, code tags) - but that doesn’t mean I need everything on MS Word’s toolbar. Still, I should make the changed to the text I type, and see it right where I typed it. I should not have to scroll down to see if the result is actually what I thought it would be - I should see it right there, where I’m already looking.
Until I saw the neon pink version with the arrows, I didn’t notice it either.
Nearly 15 years of web browsing has trained my brain to ignore the narrow side columns because THAT’S WHERE THE CRAP IS (i.e. annoying ads).
So, yes, I think some kind of cue within the “content area” is needed to draw a user’s attention to the tips over to the right…
as a technical writer, i find this entire discussion hilarious. user myopia is present everywhere, folks. users don’t want a damned phone book listing every single feature of your app, they just want to get something done & some moron in management chose your app as the tool they must use. yet my peers & i persist in writing damned phone books for them. why? because it’s too hard to actually write something that would help the user use your app.
with this knowledge i have to face work every morning …
Atwood, you should know better. It pisses me off that a supposed authority on programming says what you do.
Would you put a confirmation box on your program that says “You did not ask to delete all your data files, but if you press yes right now, all your files will be gone. I hope you are reading this.”? I’m betting that you would, and then blame the user for having pressed yes on the box without reading.
You are blaming the user here for performing behavior that the user did not even ask for.
No, you are dead wrong on this.
I am decidedly a Windows guy, but you need to ask yourself “What would Apple do?” the next time you write anything that has to do with user interfaces.
I really hate it when formatting comes with paste to my text. I never use that function, but of course it has to be default. I have to use NotePad or specifically search for paste unformatted. And in writing email I never find paste unformatted.
By the way, did I mention that I really hate it when formatting comes with paste to my text? Well, here it goes: I really hate it when formatting comes with paste to my text.
no pictures? I am not reading this… blah blah blah… jk. gj!
Asking the average computer user to follow your cumbersome (and counter intuitive) formatting rules is a prime example of stopping the user’s proceeding with idiocy.
I assume this blog post was tounge-in-cheek and you’re mearly poking fun at yourself.
Thanks.
I’ve asked a few Q’s on SU and SO, but I’ve never noticed that “Formatting Reference” on the right
More often that not, your “Live View” is below the fold, and unless you know it’s there, it’s hard to spot.
Good article btw.