So let’s get this straight: you purposefully made it a requirement that the user learn a new language in order to successfully leave a comment (you do realize that markdown is but one of several formats that users are exposed to, and that even power users get annoyed when they see this crap), you hid the language instructions in a spot that users have been taught to ignore, and you refuse to admit that other people commenting here might have some points. Your stubborn, defensive need to be right is overpowering your ability to analyze the situation and come up with a good solution that benefits the users.
If the problem is that the help your attempting to deliver to the user (in the form of the style guide) is simply being ignored, your one an only challenge is to make people aware of it without FORCING them to deal with it (at which point it becomes ‘annoying’ rather than ‘helpful’)
Simple solution, that maintains the look and feel of the site… make the style guide ‘blink in’ for new users (as you do with the new user alerts at the top of the landing page).
Simple and elegant movement catches the eye, and if the movement instantly clicks in the user’s brain as something ‘useful’ rather than a ‘shitty ad’, your golden. Given that every new user has already experienced the ‘New to the site, check out our FAQ’ header bar, and seen that it is a useful piece of site chrome, doing the same thing with the formatting guide makes sense.
Once you have solved the core problem of getting a user to rub their eyeballs over your formatting guide, you can then move on to tweaking the actual contents to serve your intended purpose.
Of course the user doesn’t care about formatting their question “properly”. That’s not their problem. They just want to ask a question. They are focused (maybe) on wording the question right. Formatting is not on their radar even as a remote consideration.
Imagine if you went to the doctor and wanted to get some help with the thumb that got hit with a hammer, and all the secretary in the front office said was, “No, you have to write your address in Old English Script with a quill pen held in your left hand while standing on one foot. Only then will the doctor see you.”
I’m going to pile on to the chorus of users criticizing the default behavior. The way the user entered their question looks perfectly fine, and then your formatting system fscks it up.
This has frustrated me as an occasional Stack Overflow user. I can see the formatting tools and tips, and I know how to use them, but the bottom line is they cause writing a question to require MORE WORK than is necessary in cases when I don’t need fancy formatting.
If you have such a serious problem with users not seeing the formatting tools, and entering their questions by using only the ever-so-rudimentary formatting available in an html text box, that should tell you that the default behavior should be to… format the output exactly as it looks in an html text box.
Jeff,
I have a couple of points:
- 98% of Internet users simply “don’t care”. They don’t care about grammar, spelling, complete sentences, or punctuation let alone formatting. This is proven by lots of “business” emails written by educated adults that look like 4th grade IM conversations.
- Your website’s primary goal is getting a user’s question answered. That’s it. Everything else you do on your site should be relevant to that goal. That means lowering the barrier to ask and answer questions as low as possible such that more questions get asked and even more eyes see and hopefully answer those questions.
- You have an image/brand that you want to protect. Namely, you don’t want SO&Co. to look like the wild-west of experts-exchange.
All the fancy eye-ball tracking data in the world can’t help you if you don’t execute your primary goal well. As some of the other readers pointed out, they disagree with your implementation of formatting/previewing/positioning a question as it’s being asked. On the one hand, you are protecting your site’s image by attempting to nicely format the data being inserted. On the other hand, the deviations from common conventions really slows down and deters the question asker.
It doesn’t matter what you do to improve this process as long as it means the questions are easier to ask and the answers are easier to get.
I do agree with:
- moving formatting reference and help tips out of common ad space
- either making the editor WYSIWYG or moving the preview pane to the side of the input to avoid scrolling
- supporting standard carriage return practices (one is newline, two is paragraph)
- instead of removing html tags you don’t want, encode them for display. Your example screenshot shows the windows share path missing because it contained some text inside angle brackets, which is crucial to that post’s message. You just got in the way of that person getting an answer to their question.
- using automated tools to identify posts that don’t seem to fit convention and “helpfully” adjusting them for better readability.
reCAPTCHA: mitch irving
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The more crap you put in front of the user, the less likely it is that they will read it.
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You point this out as a problem “users will only read the absolute minimum amount of text on the screen necessary to complete their task.”
How much unnecessary info are they supposed to read? The first couple of posts on your site, you are still an untrusted entity. They may be completely wasting their time. They will make as little commitment as possible until they see an ROI (which your site does a great job of, but it still comes later).
When it comes to Stackoverflow (which am almost a fanboy of) I think it is you who in fact may be suffering from myopia and not seeing that your UI design needs work being that a user who obviously spent a lot of effort into entering their question did not correctly format the text.
May I be so presumptuous as to make a couple of comments on the posting UI.
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“Helpful Icons” - Not so helpful. The “Globe with an arrow”, the block of 1’s and 0’s and the, well whatever that blue square is there, all non-standard and difficult to discover through trial and error.
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The idea that a little bullet item telling you a completely new way to create a paragraph should be all that “good” users need is not founded on good science at all. Argue the merits of Markdown all you want, but if you want to introduce a new way to do something so common, the impetus is on you to make that transparent if not at least easier.
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By in large, studies show that people read sites in an “F” pattern. Guess where your “helpful” text is?
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Your view of what the user sees assumes full-screen and relatively large monitor. Many users may not see the “preview”.
Not that I don’t see your issue, but the “stupid, stupid, user” attitude is a bad habit and you probably sense it already.
Nothing can screen for negligance but if you see “4. xxxxx” and no line break before it would that not be something you could catch? You don’t want to get all “clippy” about it (“I see that you are trying to make a numbered list”) but catching some of these things seems relatively trivial.
I know this is your blog and you gotta blow off steam. But you never win an argument with a customer. That’s right, we are “customers” who are funding your seaside mansion by sharing a small part of our mindspace for your ads (hopefully).
I think people are kinda missing the point here. It is still valid to point out that users do not read the screen, regardless of the validity of the help text or the editor.
I’ve referred to this phenomenon over the years as the “paper towel/toilet tissue tube” view of the screen.
Users seem to have a very narrow circle of focus as the read a screen, whereas I tend to take the whole screen in (looking for ways I, as a developer, know the developer tried to communicate function).
+1 for “Don’t Make Me Think”
If people read less give them less stuff to read.
Maybe if you use some sort of states to keep the user focused in a limited number of available tools and information to do the job?
I think this is just an example of “muddling-through” technology.
Us, the designers expect people to use things we produce in a certain way, and we’re often surprised by how people ACTUALLY use it.
A great example is people typing URLs into the search box on google or yahoo.
So, if your a search engine designer what happens when you’re presented with a URL? Do you spit it back and say: “Please learn to read the directions!! You can only use AND, OR or simple keywords!” or do you run with it and handling this kind of interaction?
People use things how THEY think it should be used, not how YOU think it should be used. You can’t get around this. So you basically have 3 choices:
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Spit it back as an error.
This is like the annoying person that tells you he simply won’t do what you’re asking. Its frustrating as hell and it makes the user upset when it happens. On the web this probably translates to someone not returning to your site. -
Narrow the doorway so no invalid input can enter.
Reformatting the data on the fly, preventing certain characters in an edit box, etc. Again this can be frustrating to the user. -
Accept odd data and run with it.
The user might not get what he expects as the result, but it’s a more comfortable learning experience than option 1 or 2. Here he gets to perform trial and error until the gets results he expects back. Option 1 and 2 simply strong-arm the user into a conforming pathway and the results are less satisfactory. In the long run you can adapt to return the results the user is probably expecting…
Um. Great post by the way. I am not sure why the users are complaining about the fact that you are noticing the disconnect between design and how it’s used.
(Hint: This post is noticing the disconnect). Hey at least he is noticing it. But again, I guess users don’t read.
Why not tie the editor to rep in some way? So if you have 0 rep, you get a plain vanilla ASCII editor that is just going to echo exactly what you type.
Once your rep climbs a bit, you would get access to additional bells and/or whistles
I am reminded of one of Joel’s principles in designing Fogbugz: that a bug should be really easy to enter. The more difficult you make it, the less bugs that get entered.
It seems to me that there is an extraordinarily easy solution: by default accept text as ascii formatted, and reproduce it exactly (stripping HTML I guess.) Then in place of the toolbar put a button called “Rich Text”. Click rich text and it switches to the interface you already have. Store the user’s preference in a cookie.
Now you have something that works for quick entry, and works as you expect, plus you have the option of rich text if you want it.
BTW, I normally put a blank line between paragraphs in comment boxes like this, but I omitted them this time just to piss you off 
Have you seen text entry at blogger.com? You enter text and it appears EXACTLY as you enter it. If you want markup, you click a button that shows you the HTML tags.
Easy as pie. Works as expected.
Suggest you put the programming tools down, take a break and enroll at an “Intro to Design 101” class at the nearest community college.
Jeff, you should know that when a user uses your product “incorrectly”, there is no one to blame but yourself. It’s painful, I know. you make this great web site for them, you give them all the tools they need, and they forget to put a carriage return in the right place. Bastards! How could they?!
Look, Markdown is fine for some people (specifically programmers), but it’s a language with it’s own syntax, a concept which most Real People™ aren’t familiar with. With StackOverflow and ServerFault, you were pretty safe, but with SuperUser, some of the Real People™ are making their way in (once they figure out how to get past the OpenID Cerberus).
Why should someone learn Markdown? What incentive do they have? Everyone already knows WYSIWYG. Yeah, yeah, Markdown is WYSIWYG for ASCII (except that it’s not, but let’s assume it is), would your grandmother understand what that means?
“Don’t want colorization? Use to line break use 2 spaces at end >blockquote.”
Makes perfect sense to me. Maybe your own formatting could use some work:
- Don’t want colorization? Use .
- To linebreak, use two spaces at the end of line.
(And I have no idea what “> blockquote” is supposed to mean.)
Users ignore sidebars because they’re the de facto holding space for ads.
When I see something that remotly looks like an ad, I ignore it.
I think your “here’s how the user sees the ask question page” image is wrong. If the user actually looks at the preview, he would see it’s not formatted.
I think the Larson cartoon does apply to user myopia.
What is one method of training a dog (user?) Positive reinforcement.
I love the badge system on S/O. Maybe there could be a bronze badge awarded for using each of the formatting options across a range of several posts.
Anyway, Keep up the great work and good posts.
-Todd
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