I don’t know how you put up with the repetitive complaints posted to your comments. Your audience is a bunch of whiny babies.
Anyway, how about a thumbnail preview to the right of the title box that updates in real time? I’m no javascript expert, but that seems doable. Looking at a tiny version of the post would alert the user that the “shape” of the post wasn’t right.
So, I guess the point of my post was don’t teach the user to read anything, show them a little picture.
I think you got your blackout version of what the user sees completely wrong. You think the user sees even more than they do. I think he only really sees the text box where he’s entering the text, and that he’s not even seeing the preview. That’s why you need a rich text editor in this case. And putting suggestions on the right side is no good… the suggestions need to go inline with the text… like red and green squigglys underneath (ala Word) or perhaps drawing a box around bad text elements that when the user hovers over tells them what is wrong.
Totally agree that users don’t read…
But, the true WTF is that your editor’s formatting rules are plain stupid and unnatural. Period.
Oh and the “Formatting Reference” sucks very much too - and it looks like some Google ads.
The user might have typed those text in a simple notepad and copy-pasted it to the text field and submitted. Some users would not notice your cute pink button and handy formatting quick reference maybe fearing it for another roll over ad.
Notice that if the user doesn’t see something important in a web page as in this case.
It’sallthedeveloper’sfault
You don’t need to put the help in their line of sight. As you said, users don’t read it, no matter how obvious the text may sound to us.
Instead you just have to make an intuitive interface for the goal, and then on the back-end compensate for user-error. Otherwise, its your error.
I think you’re missing the point. The problem is not with your UI (although I am sure there are improvements to be made), or the fact that the users didn’t bother to read your formatting guidelines (which they certainly didn’t). The problem is that many users simply don’t care about formatting or style, and no matter how easy you make it you’ll still have questions coming out looking like diarrhea.
It fits into your “do my homework for me” line of thinking. Many people are unwilling (or perhaps unable?) to invest the time into making their writing visually appealing. The question you illustrate could have been made to look nice with linebreaks without and markdown at all, but the user chose not to.
This is not to say you shouldn’t strive to improve your UI, but if you think that an auto-updating JavaScript widget or moving the guidelines somewhere else or highlighting it with color is going to make this problem magically go away, you’re dreaming.
Back in the 80’s when I was working as a graphic designer in a small shop most of the 286’s in the shop were used by sales people, often working in DOS. Being a bit more computer literate than most of them, I was constantly hearing ‘Hey! It didn’t work! Can you come look at this?’
I’d get up from my desk, walk to their machine, read what was on the (monochrome) screen, then read it out loud to them, and walk back to my desk as they said ‘Oh. Thanks.’
After a while I’d stay at my desk and just call out ‘What does it say?’ then wait a few seconds for their ‘Oh. Thanks.’ reply.
The fun thing is, you all think it is myopia… But what if… the user just doesn’t care if his numbering is screwed up. What if he considers it to much work to re-format what he just typed. I can get to that, we aren’t all perfectionists.
A good think might be to apply a ‘readability’-algorithm (yes, they exist!). This might allow you to inform your users that the text they just typed is not very readable which will result in less answers.
If that doesn’t help, you could even give a suggestion on how to mark-up the text by formatting it yourself and show that to the user (again, with the algorithm).
Granted, this will make people even more lazy, but if they don’t have to do it, they can’t screw it up…
This extraneous cognitive load is one reason why users don’t see what you want them to see. As you pointed out, they are focused on their task. Any extraneous information is deliberately ignored in order to allow them to perform that task. To you, it’s obvious, to them, it’s information that does not pertain to their immediate goal.
Also, formatting is important to you, as the reader of the message. Users don’t particularly care about how their message is formatted, as long as they get an answer to their question. Sensitive users will try to make it easy to read. Most users couldn’t care less.
I’m surprised I didn’t see anyone mention the book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug – it’s something you may want to read, Jeff. (You can also check it out at http://www.sensible.com/)
I’m no professional, I just keep putting tools together to ‘solve problems’ at work, but I every time I put one of these tools together, I’m forced to revisit this book. I don’t literally pick it up, but every time a user comes to me to tell me the tool doesn’t work, it’s always “user error” because they missed the link, but when I think about it, I could have made the tool easier to use.
Moral of the story: Don’t blame the user. If users have difficulty with your tool, simplify it.
Don’t make them think.
Personally, I’ve found on Stack Overflow that formatting reference rather confusing, not to mention, it just refused to format my code properly. The whole 2 spaces for a line break and 4 spaces for indentation together just did not work for me. It was a rather unpleasant experience, pretty flawed.
Still love the site, highly useful, I just wish that could be better.
Newline, shmewline.
I think the user did a great job. Just look at the upper box in the screenshot, with the monospace font, nicely formatted, lines ending where the user meant them to. Great job, perfectly done to convey the user’s meaning.
Then the mean old website took that masterpiece of clarity, applied a different, proportionally spaced font and ran it through a renderer that uses completely different formatting rules than the input box which the user was given to express their ideas.
You might as well have translated it to Russian and back. For a site whose express purpose is to gather sometimes complex and technical information from questioners it should be a design goal to preserve the fidelity of their expression.
A problem is that there is no simple way to tell the browsers “render this content read only but exactly like the input box that it came from” without Olympian CSS calisthenics.
I personally think WYSIWYG is overrated - you hardly ever really S what you will eventually G. I’d be happy with monospaced text for most communication.
“Users do read. 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.”
Of course, what would you expect?
Only the members who are genuinely interested in forming part of your community would care about your rules. Casual users couldn’t care less, they don’t want to waste their time reading the rules of a website to which they will never return after their question is answered.
Use the wikipedia approach, let the users make all the mistakes they want and get a good staff of editors to correct them when they screw up.
Back in the day, I worked at a big computer company with a Human Factors lab down the hall from my office. We’d regularly sign-up for HF product testing. It was fun.
One of these tests was configuring the cabling for a small server. We had to match cable to socket. Not too hard in a pre-USB world.
However, the power socket was covered with a bright red label that said to be sure to put the switch on the power supply to the right voltage setting (110/220) before plugging in the computer. Every engineer I knew who took the test peeled off the red label and threw it away, then plugged in the power cord, without ever reading the bright red label.
The engineers were doing what we always did - get rid of stuff that blocked the ports so we could connect the cables. And we’ve all learned that red labels near power cords always have some sort of bullshit warning and danger info. You know, the kind of crap that everyone ignores because we’re all smart enough to not put our computers in the bathtub, to not bite through the cable, to not let 2 year-olds play with the power, or other stuff.
After enough systems were blown-apart because of the wrong voltage settings, power supply designers learned how to auto-sense the voltage.
The moral of the story is that users are not stupid. They do the most natural thing that the rest of the universe has taught them to do. Bad design, on the other hand, prevents using any previously-acquired knowledge from being useful. It makes users frustrated. It impedes getting work done. And designers who make badly designed systems must learn to be a lot less smug and condescending.
I think your main problem was where you put the formatting reference, people tune out to this part of the screen because it is usually where advertising is.
Also I can use it but I don’t like the markdown thing a wysiwyg one would be easier in my opinion. Maybe a choice between the two.
Fixing user myopia isn’t the problem. The user has formated their text perfectly. It’s Markdown that took that text and garbled the formatting
I noticed that you got defensive when people answered the question you asked. Don’t.
Drop the second view. At first glance, it looks like a web mail interface, so it should behave that way. GMail doesn’t show me my formatted text half a screen away.
The help in the right panel looks like ads, and is too cluttered. Poor formatting, maybe?
Besides, I’m here to ask a question, not learn your mark-up language. My guess is that the user noticed the poor formatting, but didn’t care to spend the extra time fixing it. I wouldn’t either.
I completely agree that users will not read the help text. I also completely agree with the other commentors that from the user’s perspective he has typed a perfectly well formatted question, and it’s really a failure in the system to display it as such. Requiring that the user use a carriage return between paragraphs when the text as they entered otherwise looks perfectly fine is really just imposing the system’s constraints on the user, and violates the principle of least surprise.
I think that the whole thing can be reduced to 2 problems:
1 - In your image, the user press once, and it doesn’t get any line break. But if he presses twice, he gets two line breaks: one at the end of the paragraph, other to just add a “blank line” between the paragraphs.
2 - Some people like to separate paragraphs with one blank line, others don’t. But you’re trying to obligate them to always use a blank line…
If using markdown is giving wrong use in your application, simple stop using it.