The attitude of Jeff’s post and especially his comments and this thread is one of contempt for his users. The users who are providing content that makes his website something anybody gives a damn about. I might consider that a firable offense.
Joel and Jeff are certainly sending some interesting signals about their relationship with their readers/user/content providers.
Stop trying to defend your poor design choices and just accept the obvious. People are having trouble with the markdown editor. Embrace the opportunity to improve! Drop the ego! Markdown was just fine for a programming audience because programmers love to discover new things and they’re very detail oriented. Everyone else just wants to write a damned question or answer and get on with their life. Seriously, if they go:
this
that
…isn’t it pretty obvious they wanted to make a damned list? Is your choice markdown just dogma now?
Please, for goodness sake, stop treating the users like they’re dumb. They just have more important things to do with their day.
I know what you mean. Know of the MMO game project Infinity? Never mind. It’s not really important, what’s important is that it has an online forum where you can go to discuss the development and the game to be. And in one thread the topic of tutorials came up. Many were in favor of an elaborate story based tutorial, some were thinking little unobtrusive hints popping up much like the Windows notifications.
I, having seen and knowing full well even intelligent players would simply ignore these when playing the game, and then 5 seconds later ask me how to play. (annoying me to no end) Instantly thought of something far more dramatic. I made a mockup with an old prototype screenshot. The idea was to pause the game, cover the screen in a dark overlay with very few, very large and very simple instructions so that even if you were to instantly skip it you would still have taken in the information. Unignorable. Occuring only when you would have to do the relevant action. Ensuring users wouldn’t get bored reading too much.
Left 4 Dead has already employed, with some success a similar scheme. The game doesn’t get paused, but you can’t miss the messages as they cover a large part of the playable screen space. The result is I haven’t once experienced a new player coming into the game asking how to play. I think video games are ahead in communicating with users because failure to do so is much more critical to the gameplay experience, of other players too, than say someone not quite getting the formatting right on a QA website.
You’ll have to take your hat off, Jeff. As about 90% of the other comments say, your site should adapt to the mental image the users have of how it should work, not the other way around.
I mean, StackOverflow is great, and I have a bit of rep, but I haven’t ever noticed the “help” on the right, either. And I find the buttons WAY un-intuitive, so I just try to edit my comments Wikipedia-style. And I haven’t ever known about that “two-spaces before newline” stuff. Seriously, WTF???
Commentator “Ferdy” (above), nails it completely. Jeff, I do think you’re arguing the wrong side in this case. The user shouldn’t have to make any effort, the developer should.
You know that better than most - time to fire up the IDE again I think.
Why did you have to put my question as an example? So what I didn’t use a return character when I was typing in my question - am I evil? I guess all I was trying to do was ask a complex question that took a lot of thought to describe it in a meaningful way. Formatting was the lest of my concerns - asking the question to convey the issues was the real difficulty that I was struggling with. After this embarrassment I can’t see myself ever getting on asking another question - Experts Exchange for me now
Tough choice on the trade-off? I know the form is the central function of that page, but if you really want to get people to read the instruction, the research suggests you have to move it to a hotspot.
I’d only say its worth changing if a significant portion (15%+) are getting it wrong…
“we’ve provided a handy formatting quick reference”
I think you should redo the part starting from at “> blockquote” and finishing by “foo”. Maybe it’s because english is not my first language, but I can’t guess what the fuck is meant there.
A couple of previous commenters have mentioned Joel so, straight from page 6 of “User Interface Design From Programmers” by Joel Spolsky:
“Thus, the cardinal axiom of all user interface design: ‘A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.’”
Markdown might be acceptable for StackOverflow but I wonder how the many StackExchange sites are coping with it?
The main issue I believe is that the text you type gets rendered differently from when you type it.
So Jeff, in your image where you blacked out the parts you think the users do not see, I would also add the preview part. A lot of users may be typing on smaller screens, including netbooks, and the preview might be just too far down the page to see. Or even larger screens, but since the comment input is at the bottom of the page the user might not have scrolled down all the way.
Also, when typing you might not be constantly checking the preview, you might do that once and then forget later, because it looks OK in the input field.
The best way to address the problem would be to make the output appear exactly as how it appears in the input box.
If that’s not possible, a possibility would be to pop up the preview once the user clicks submit so that it effectively becomes the only thing you see, with a shading Javascript effect to make it even more obvious, and ask them to confirm or edit.
Or at least what looks like the formatting toolbar. As soon as the user sees this, he probably assumes this is a rich text/WYSIWYG editor, and thus assumes the question should display as typed. When the preview doesn’t look right, the user probably assumes the website is broken. While that is a wrong assumption, it still gives the user a negative impression of the site that could have been avoided.
Take out the toolbar, and then it’s just a text box. A gloriously simple text box. And how should one format text in a simple text box… who knows! But at that point either the user doesn’t care and will just type, or then he might go looking for a pink help button or some instructions near the text box.
I think it’s less about User Myopia and more about leading the end user. The toolbar is misleading.
Now onto everyone else’s comments:
+1 “What’s the benefit of ignoring single carriage returns?”
+1 “The point of ‘Teaching Users to Read’ is not to teach users to read, but that you should design UI so they don’t have to.”
+1 “if one person tell you that you drink to much you can ignore it, if you hear it again, you should think about it. If 3 people tell you that you need to consult a doctor.”
-1 “'How do we treat user myopia? How do we reach these users?'
By irritating them until they either stop being lazy and learn to read, or get so irritated that they leave us alone.” – the goal of most websites is not to drive people away.
@jmucchiello
"If they want to center text vertically, they add a bunch of blank lines in front of the text until it looks good."
I’m pretty computer literate and have been using Word since Word for MS-DOS and every version since, and I had no idea there was another way to center text vertically. I just looked it up in Word 2007 help, and there it is! Wow, I did not know that.
However, I still think I will just add a bunch of blank lines as that is still easier that looking for that goofy setting.
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The formatting reference is no clearer than the formatted text in the screen capture. I had to reread parts of it three times before it occurred to me that its structure is a point-form list of sentence fragments. After rereading it in detail, I’m still not sure what some of it means.
Maybe users don’t read stuff that’s hard to read, even if it’s short. One might consider getting some graphic design and copywriting help.
Remind me not to rent a car from you. This isn’t 1975. People have been using text editors and web sites for years now. When you present someone with a car with the steering wheel controlling the throttle, the transmission lever controlling the direction of the front wheels, the accelerator pedal controlling the gear shift and so on, don’t be surprised when they have trouble pulling out of the lot safely.
There are widely acknowledged, well known user interface conventions that lots of people are familiar with. Show some respect. You don’t require your users to use an object-verb-subject version of English so they sound like Yoda, don’t require them to learn a new way of interacting.
But the user DID format their text. Just not the way you wanted the user to.
Users know by now not to press unless they want to make a paragraph break, so let them do what’s natural: Let the mark a paragraph. That simple. If a user doesn’t want to use automatic numbering and bullets, don’t fret. Let them do what they want. If a user presses , consider it a paragraph and display a blank line in between the two paragraphs. That’ll handle 90% of the issues.
For example, if a user types:
I have a problem and I don’t know what to do.
Here’s a breakdown of the issues:
This is my problem
This is another issue.
This is my other issue.
Instead of formatting as:
I have a problem and I don’t know what to do. Here’s a breakdown of the issues: 1. This is my problem 2. This is another issue. 3. This is my other issue.
Format it as:
I have a problem and I don’t know what do do.
Here’s a breakdown of the issues:
This is my problem
This is another issue.
This is my other issue.
After all, you allow for absolutely no formatting in this website even though it attracts extremely sophisticated users.
?
