I think almost everyone has missed the point of the piece. It isn’t about the choice of user text input interface, that is just the example being used here, but rather user myopia. You know. Like the title says.
Oh, now I notice: there are 3 mistakes !
The third one is that the blog entry made me think we would discuss “users don’t read important messages”, but what it’s really about is “it makes me sad when users don’t use the formating codes I want”.
Sorry, Jeff, this blog discussion was about a wrong concept you have.
I’m on the trilogy, with lots of experience. I’ve asked a few questions, and answered a lot more. I’ve used that form perhaps hundreds of times. I’m intelligent, and read very well. I pay attention to error messages in dialog boxes, even.
I never noticed those instructions until the second screenshot in your blog entry, the one with the bright red arrows pointing to it. I’ve been doing formatting with my standard habits plus the toolbar, and with the exception of lists it’s been working.
If you want the formatting to work, you should either modify it (at least to preserve single line breaks) or figure out exactly which species you want to target, because it sure doesn’t work for Homo Sapiens.
What about the Help? Are you saying users don’t read the Help?
Or the manual?
(yes, I’m making a joke)
Breck
You idiots. One of the few times Jeff writes something completely sane and correct and you go blabbing about how line breaks should somehow automatically turn into paragraphs?
Do you people think that cars should somehow top up their own oil?
Do you think that all doors should have little screens with animations showing how to open and close them?
Please, sometimes you have to think for yourself – perhaps even pay attention.
Get your heads out of your asses.
I can’t believe you just wrote this post. I called up a few friends and said the same thing. I was just talking about dialog boxes earlier in the week about how no one reads them and they’re useless in their current state. I don’t wanna give away any ideas, but it’s nice to know someone else feels the same way.
Your error lies elsewhere. You give rules (of formatting) and expect people to seek them, learn them and obey them. That’s a lot to do if they just want to ask question.
Is it really that hard to extract the intention of having numbered list from the text entered by user?
Put the pavement where the people walk instead of putting the “don’t walk on the grass, sidewalk is to your right, go around” sign.
We live in a WYSIWYG world
It would be much easier if the editor, witch seems to be WYSIWYG actually was!
It makes no sense to force the user to learn yet another formating “language”
The user is expecting what he types to be correctly formated on the web site specially for paragraphs
Actually I think the blame is on the UI designer for designing a poor and user unfriendly interface rather than on the myopic user
I think Jeff is having a case of cognitive dissonance – he’s committed to Mardown being the bestest thing ever, so when the results are less than satisfactory, it must be the user’s fault! Can’t they read??? Don’t they know they should leave a blank line between paragraphs?
BTW, the only think unconventional about that post was the missing newline before the list. It is perfectly conventional not to put blank lines between list items.
-
This
-
looks
-
like
-
crap.
People are busy, and come to the site to get their job done.
If you really are committed to Markdown, and really can’t tolerate poorly formatted messages, then it seems the solution lies in the reputation system. Build a culture where well-formatted questions get upvotes and quick answers, and poorly formatted questions don’t.
Although I agree with the “User Myopia” phenomenon, I argue that the current editor fails the Principle of Least Surprise. 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. By forcing people to enter extra newlines you’re going against their entire history of authoring text where WYSIWYG.
This exists with the formatter in Basecamp, too. So much so that all my users have gotten in the habit of pre text /pre in order to stop it from blowing up their text. To me, that’s not a user problem. That’s a programming/UI problem.
For the stackoverflow sites, my vote would be to fix the bizarre markdown newline semantics.
If you can’t, my failback vote would be: if you don’t detect any markdown in there, then the user probably doesn’t want it, so don’t apply the wacky newline rules. Make it look like the user intended.
Or you could make the code do what the user expects it to do, that’s always an option
@nuno costa, if perfect WYSIWYG designer would exist there would be not issues in this world 
Generally I think the problem is much bigger the the UI and line-breaks.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT CONTENT PUBLISHING IS IMMATURE AND TOOLS USED ARE WRONG:
http://dnagir.blogspot.com/2009/10/content-managementpublishing-system.html
What’s a “carriage return”? What carriage is returning?
And even if you think ASCII, who the hell uses carriage returns to separate lines? Only Mac OS 9 and before.
I
like
it
as
it
is.
Doesn’t
everyone
use
the
enter
key
as
a
space
bar?
I put empty lines between paragraphs, but I don’t see lists (numbered or not numbered) as a separate paragraph:
First paragraph…
Second paragraph… Some text that explains the list…
- list item
- list item
I tried number 2, but it didn’t work (or something like that).
Third paragraph…
Awww, damn, your screwy comment text editor foolishly interpreted my use of the enter key as wanting line breaks. Where the hell did you get the absurd idea that the enter key means a line break?
Wow. There’s an over reaching trend here of “we did it right, shut up and learn the right way”.
Carriage returns are called carriage returns for a reason. It’s like you built a site where backspace is now the enter key, and you complain that users are not reading all the labels that clearly say backspace is the enter key. You completely ignored keyboard functionality that 99% of users are used to in all of their common development programs.
The double space part is crap. It doesn’t make sense, and even after months of being on SO, I still have to go back and revise to add your special “line breaks”. I type 90+ words per minute. Why should I (or any user) relearn my keyboard usage for your one site? Yes, K put a carriage return between all his paragraphs… Amazingly he did it using the key designated for CARRIAGE RETURN on his keyboard. Why didn’t I think of that? Two spaces makes so much more sense though…
Also your “Just click the numbered list” part is also pretty meh. In every other editor I use, numbered lists continue with the carriage return (again, SO stubbornly refuses to acknowledge sixty years of definition for what the carriage return is). Instead on stack overflow I have to type my entire list, then highlight, then go up an click the numbered list to transform everything.
Markup = Cool feather-in-cap for developers, suck for users. We get it, you’re not going to back down until the world acknowledges that you have the one right way for html comment editors.
Typing in plain text is always easy: because what you see is what you get.
When you’ve got to interpret that and parse it out into your pretty little html/css/bullshit – you’re asking the user to put more ‘work’ into not breaking your interpreter.
The guy hates dialog boxes because they’re interruptive, yet apparently it’s not interruptive to have to ‘learn how to type text’ on his website.
Interesting.
alwin,
Agreed.
Paragraphs, under normal English convention, have whitespace between them.
It feels completely natural to NOT have whitespace between lists. Perhaps Microsoft Word is to blame? You start a list and hit enter ONCE and you get a new bullet. But, everyone smashes enter twice to create a new paragraph.
I don’t think that’s the user’s fault.
This is definitely a poor posting. It could have been summarised as ‘I’ve created this thing that catches lots of people out when I could have quite easily fixed it by applying some thought, but what I’ll do is blog about the fact that they didn’t read some hints that I put in a location that most users ignore.’
Why do they ignore it? Because the side-bar of a page is normally stuffed full of adverts on most websites.