I’m a programmer with a long history of technical support. The first time I tried to post a question in Stack Overflow, it took me about half an hour to figure out how to use that #$%@!@ Markdown crap. To begin with, I had no idea why my formatting was being destroyed, and then when I found the ‘explicit’ instructions in the right hand area of the page (where I usually ignore the ads), they were, to my mind, quite obscure.
Wow. Lot’s of strong feelings here. Actually, I thought this post was pretty good and made me think about an often overlook problem in user interaction design. If you doubt that for minute, try searching the web for “windows vista popups” - you’ll find some related rants, for sure!
The reason I was drawn to comment though was that I doubt SuperUser will be improved by creating a ‘template’ question for new users. If anything, it will create a flurry of questions that look like:
My [fill in your OS] keeps crashing. Help!
- List Item
- List Item
- Bullet Item
Blockquote
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There is a better The Far Side for what you want. Same panel except the dog is replaced with a cat. The top panel title is “What we say to cats”. The speech bubble in the “what they hear” panel is completely empty.
Jeff, you apparently have never seen typical user Word documents. If they want to indent the first line of a paragraph, they type 5 spaces. If they want a blank line between paragraphs, they type a blank line. If they want to center text vertically, they add a bunch of blank lines in front of the text until it looks good. All those buttons and whatnot in the toolbar are meaningless noise. The menu with the name Format, meaningless. That’s a tool these kinds of users use every day. Now you want this user to come to your website for the first time and understand how to format stuff when it isn’t WYSIWYG?
I have a decent stackoverflow rep and I can never get the link format right the first time. Is it ()[] or and is it text before link or link before text? Of course I’m usually answering questions and the help text where the ads goes isn’t even there for me see.
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I agree that the editing/previewing combination needs work, and that the sidebar goes largely unread. I’m intrigued that no one apart from Phenwoods has commented on the content of the sidebar text. There’s room for improvement here, I think.
“How to Ask” could be deleted entirely.
“Is your question about computer software or computer hardware” isn’t helpful. I’m inclined to answer with one of the choices: “My question is about computer software.” But what does that mean?
“We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed” could be replaced with “Questions only, please! No discussions.”
“If your question is about this website, ask it on meta instead” could be “Questions about this site? Ask on meta.”
My point is that even if I start reading the sidebar, I’d probably stop. I’m reminded of something your friend Joel once wrote about a wordy dialog box on Juno.
That Formatting Reference looks like it was written by a 6 year old.
“linebreak” should be “line break” or perhaps “line-break” since it is being used as a verb. It looks as if the “to linebreak” part is a continuation of the previous line reading “don’t want colorization? use pre to linebreak use 2 spaces at end”
“> blockquote”? WTF?!?!
Why are your insisting in “The root problem is lack of carriage returns between paragraphs, which is sort of a fairly accepted standard for net conversation … just read the 20+ comments above yours. Notice a pattern?” It looks correct in input field. thats enough. (also in the input field it looks like eitehr carriage return or spaces, neither can be seen below.
Speaking as a professional graphic designer, typesetter, type fancier, and member of the last pre-desktop-computer generation, I feel compelled to point out that the skip-a-line method of separating paragraphs is a recent and unfortunate development. It arose out of e-mail, USENET, and other ASCII-based text unable to handle even the simplest formatting. Before that, in a practice still used in print (read any novel, for instance), paragraphs were demarcated visually by indenting the first line, and not by skipping lines, even when using a typewriter. However, on-line text boxes are too stupid—er, too limited in their capabilities to allow this method, so the alternative grew out of regrettable necessity. Also, so far as I can tell, most of the people who introduced this habit were engineers, whom I have noted, from years of experience with them, seem to treat the rules of written and spoken English in a rather cavalier fashion.
Wow. Lots of nasty comments. The premise of the post is correct: that people ignore just about everything. And we all have supendous examples.
The example is weak, however. What it really shows is how huge the gap can be between first time user and even a seasoned UI developer.
Its weakness is that it has its own paradigm and conventions that every first time user could not reasonably be expected to get right without plenty of care, time, reading and investigation. Once (if) they start to wonder what colorization or backticks are you’ve likely lost them. It’s obvious to you, Jeff, but not all users. Therein lies the problem, and it is not easy to solve!
Blame the user for bad software. Stop wasting your time trying to train everyone and just have the question look the same as what the user typed in the format they typed it in.
There is no technical solution for a user not caring.
You’ve gotten around it by instituting User editing. Without it, the trilogy sites would be unbearable to navigate and would resemble all the other programming forums on the internet.
I’m a user – why is it wrong for me to assume that what I input is what will actually be ultimately displayed?
I’m a developer – I’ve created this awesome piece of software. Why is it that, regardless of instructions or help or walkthroughs or whatever one might come up with to ‘assist’ users, the users never use the software ‘right’?
The bottom line is, whatever users do with software IS right.
Taking the issue at hand, the solution is a WYSIWYG text input. Forget the preview: there’s nothing indicating that’s an actual preview and even if there was, in fat bold undelined letters, the user is focused on the input box, that’s what he/she sees, nothing else. In fact, that fancy toolbar is for ‘advanced’ users.
People aren’t understanding (or possibly even reading) how to use your web site. Your options are:
- Leave the site the same, and blog about how users are myopic/dumb/some-other-negative-adjective.
- Change the site to make it easier to use.
Which option results in a better web site? Which results in more respect for you, rather than less?
No only do users not read anything they don’t have to, it is naive of us to expect them to do otherwise.
Heck, I didn’t even bother to read the rest of the comments to see if this point had already been made!
If you’re truly concerned about how your site is used, I suggest usability testing (see useit.com for many ways to do this on the cheap).
“…this particular asker, who, apparently, was totally satisfied with obviously broken formatting…”
So… was there actually an issue here if the user was apparently totally satisfied?
Say you sell a fine piece of precision machinery to the user, who uses it as a hammer to put up a picture. You both win, and leave it at that.
On the topic of cognitive dissonance, why is the entry in a fixed-width font and the preview text in a proportional font? Looks like it’s the case here too. Is this a best practice?
Dog pile!
I’m going to have to agree with the folk who think that the original text looked just fine.
Question: Why is it that WYSIWYG is universal in application programming land but an alien concept in web page land? As an application developer I am continuously both infuriated and amazed by the ridiculous work arounds employed by web developers.
A preview area? Really? Is this what we’re doing now? This is the state of the art? Is flash unable to solve this problem for you? Is fancy-pants super-dynamic HTML powerless? Do we need to break out the old java applet framework?
I don’t need a manual down the side of my screen explaining something that I’ve been able to do in every word processor since about 1984. If you can’t do a decent editor at least give me plain text and get out of my way.
Ok, rant over… back to real work.
How about if, by default, markdown is switched off, along with the preview pane.
Users who don’t currently see anything other than what they’re typing will get exactly what they type, without any fancy formatting. So the example above will work just fine.
Users who see the markdown button can press it to turn on the toolbar and preview pane. The site will remember this for future visits.
Does this not give the best of both worlds?
I think you should hire a user usability expert to re-design the foundation of your site series. Then you should charge your users so that you can recover all the money you blew on the usability expert.
This backlash is SOP. Google recently got it by making the search bar bigger. Microsoft also with the new MSDN. I received backlash from customers when I changed the font on a web application from Times New Roman to Verdana. “Please change it back, it hurts my eyes” - That is a direct user quote.
Hopefully you’ll get enough positive feedback that this issue drops off the radar.
There was a recent study that came to the conclusion that users will ignore sidebar advertisements and anything that looks like advertisements. The negative space just makes it look separated from the site and therefore an ad.
The user wants to do things their way; you want them to do it your way.
Here it is on my screen. When I view the page, the box is so far down I can’t see it without scrolling down.
Second of all, I’m a programmer those instructions suck. Good luck getting a non technical users to make sense of them.