So, a large proportion of the commenters on this site think that you should have a carriage return meaning a line break, and you tell them they are wrong.
I don’t disagree, we’re still considering that, but it’s kind of irrelevant for the specific example in the post.
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?
Yep, carriage return between paragraphs. 
Jeff: Some people (me included) separate paragraphs with double-linebreak. Many (most?) don’t, though.
I can’t imagine what world you’ve been living in if you only now noticed it.
Seriously, it’s strange to hear from you complaining about users. Even I, being a geek, prefer being able to do whatever I want, without first reading a “how to” on this. Especially for something as trivial as writing text.
When designing a site you have to account for your users’ previous experience. Look at expert-sex-change. Top of page - ads. Whole right column - ads and bullshit. Bottom of page - ads. And almost every other site out there does the same thing.
You can’t just go and start putting useful information in exact same location and expect people to look at it.
Sure users don’t read everything on the screen.
Have you ever watched a user who tries to do this - I have!
It takes forever to read everything, and by the time they are done they’ve taken in so much info (often in the “wrong” order) that they are just confused.
Reading virtually nothing works pretty well.
If you think WYSIWYG isn’t the solution I’d suggest plain text input as the default, with markup as an option - hopefully when people switch markup on they would read a couple of lines of text about what it does.
Don’t blame the user. While what the user was typing wasn’t the most wonderful formatting in the world, it had line breaks in reasonable places, and the numbered list was actually a list. It wasn’t great (some whitespace between paragraphs would have helped), but it was at least readable. The version in the preview pane was not.
You need to make single carriage returns do what they are supposed to (start a new line), and you’ll eliminate half the problem.
Also, as others have pointed out, you need to block out the preview pane in your ‘what the user sees’ item. The user ONLY sees what he’s typing.
Also - are you HTML people really so out of touch with this world? Is there really some alternative universe where pressing [Enter] in a plaintext editor means “Ignore what I just did and continue on the same line, this button was probably a mistake.”?
Sure, the CR issue is one for the user but I wonder if they stopped to think that the preview didn’t match the text they had written? Even so, it should at least match the basic ASCII even if the user didn’t hit return a couple of times; surely that’s how a user expects computer to function?
As for the rest of stuff the user didn’t see - perhaps they were typing their post on a small display and weren’t even aware of the formatting options present? While you commented on how the UI designer may see the page, it’s wrong to assume all users view the site on a display large enough (even a window large enough to see the whole page).
It’d be interesting to know how many users have this exact problem (using only one line return for a paragraph break). I would expect it to be quite low at present since MS Word (most people’s primary WYSIWYG editor) has taught 2 line breaks = paragraph break.
Of course, the irony is that Word 2007 has changed this to 1 line break = paragraph break, breaking convention for a whole load of users.
In fairness to Jeff, Markdown is probably the best input system there is. It piggybacks fairly entrenched ASCII formatting stylistics and converts them into pretty HTML.
I don’t disagree, we’re still considering that, but it’s kind of irrelevant for the specific example in the post.
Well no, not really. The user in the example has not taken advantage of any of the formatting features of markdown. Such a person is expecting that the comment will still display roughly as he has laid it out in ascii. Interpreting CRs as line breaks would go a long way to achieving this - it is a kind of graceful degradation, if you like.
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?
Yeah, but we KNOW (after all, this is what we are discussing) so it would be kind of obtuse to actually refuse to do it.
The user in question is (probably) not refusing out of awkwardness, and presumably he is not an isolated example or you would not be writing about him.
People won’t really read stuff which’s in an area where usually ads are.
When I see that “How To Ask” box, I always think it’s an ad.
I must admit I haven’t seen the “Formatting reference text”. I found out because of:
User myopia isn’t treatable!
At my last job we’ve tried built a helpful wizard to help users build a search query (sort of thing that gets executed every day and e-mails the results). Internal usability testing showed our wizard text wasn’t being read.
So we set bigger fonts to the help text - nothing.
We set the text in bold - nothing.
We changed the background of the text and added a border - nothing.
We animated the help text to slide-in - nothing.
Users basically thought the flashy text was an ad and ignored it. The more attention we tried to focus on it the less attention it got. Using advertising tricks to grab user attention backfires - which makes perfect sense.
I agree with Bill also. The editor should be WYSWYG, with no markup whatsoever.
I’ve been using the FogBugz wiki editor for a while now, and I’ve also been posting a tiny bit on Stackoverflow. For me the FogBugz experience is way better . You should really try it out for a while and see the difference.
Another wiki engine that does that very well in my opinion is PBWorks : very good user experience me thinks.
“Why should one have to read the instructions in order to post? It should be a skill we learn once, and then use forever. It shouldn’t be something we have to re-learn on every single site we visit.”
In the ideal world, that would be the case - and believe me I’ve wished for this many times over the years when I’ve posted on a forum, only to find out my post looks like cr*p because that particular forum software has a different standard for brackets or tags!
But until there is a universal internet standard for freeform text input (i.e. never), different sites are going to implement said input differently. This is where I like SO’s approach, because Markdown is so simple: four spaces or backtick for code, right angle bracket for quote, double angle brackets for a link… a goldfish could remember that ;). And 99% of the time, do you need anything more?
Although I will agree that making links with Markdown is a pain, particularly if you’re trying to add a link in a comment, where the angle brackets seem to be ignored.
Nevermind the semantics; the problem is that you’re thinking like a goddam programmer and you what you end up saying is pretty much “that’s not according to spec!”.
You imply between the lines that you really do want to help the user to make his posts look good, except your premise and conclusions are wrong.
Most of your users also seem to be programmers, so mentally they’re treating your textarea as emacs/vim/etc and yell at you when their post isn’t formatted as they entered it (and “normal” users will do just the same). And you respond with what probably every other programmer on the planet would’ve responded: “Your syntax is all wrong! Read the fscking sidebar!”.
See the problem there?
“But users will only read the absolute minimum amount of text on the screen necessary to complete their task. I can’t quite explain it, but this kind of user myopia is epidemic. It’s the same problem, everywhere I turn.”
You say that as if your users were the problem.
If you’ll ever have look in any good usability book you’ll find one of the most important axioms: “treat that user as if he is competent but extremely busy”.
Sales guys love to hear themselves talk, software developers love to read everything they’ve put on their user interfaces. Regular guys loathe both.
@Goran: you’ve hit the nail on the head - positive reinforcement rarely seems to work, but negative reinforcement does.
As an example, one of our company’s clients does telemarketing (yeah I know… blech) and the telemarketers were constantly ignoring warnings from our program, and hence capturing bad data.
So (with the permission of the client) we setup a training session, in which we made it quite clear that if the users f*cked up the data capture because they ignored what the app was telling them, then they would be penalised - monetarily.
The quality of the captured data improved dramatically after that; we do still get bad data, but nowadays it’s generally due to genuine user error as opposed to user ignorance.
Jeff:
I’ve had the same issue when posting, I type out posts like would when I create a plain text email or readme file in notepad. So I’m disappointed when the formatting is not preserved. I then have to go back and figure out how to format my plain text for Stack Overflow. This seems like a silly step.
If you want to see a WYSIWYG example that doesn’t require this extra step, go to Blogger and copy and paste that same message in the default “Compose” view. For people that want full control of the HTML, you can click on the “Edit HTML” tab which allows you to change HTML.
My advice would be to implement a technology that doesn’t get in the way of the user performing his task. Asking users to format readable plaintext adds no value and is a roadblock.
Josh.
The default for behavior offline is to use the product and only refer to the manual when you get into trouble. Remember that old saw about the first instruction in a test or manual being “read this document completely before going on to the next step?”
This behavior occurs even when using products that could potentially maim or kill you, like power tools and automobiles. (Be honest, who’s ever read their car manual cover to cover?) Why would we expect anything different from a user when it comes to software?
Either make the editor WYSIWYG or just plain text, that markup stuff is just dumb. Also, there’s a real problem in that text too, not just that you don’t like the formatting: see where he (she?) is talking about the path? Now look at it in the preview - it’s “broken” there.