This page discusses usability of the MoinMoin wiki. Usability is very important for wikis because the users create the content, which in turn makes the wiki useful. Usability by first time users is especially important for wiki adoption since the utility of the wiki will be lowest when there are the most first time users (because of a lack of content). The perceived cost/benefit of a low-utility, difficult-to-use system could turn off new users.
Schema
To prevent this from being a hodgepodge of observations and to make it open for others to add to, we should agree on a schema for the data that goes here. Ideally this would be the usability version of MoinBenchmarks. What are the equivalent tables and fields?
- Yeah, that's also my question. How do you want to gauge accessibility/usability in numerical terms?
- It doesn't necessarily have to be quantitative. At one extreme it could be a simple list of usability events. User A doesn't realize heed needs to scroll/click/whatever when doing activity B. Now this doesn't get at how common a problem this is, but it creates awareness that it could be a problem. The developers could then look at the list and use common sense whether it's plausible this is a widespread problem for the target audience. This approach lends itself to culling the wiki for user interface problems as suggested above. I wasn't really thinking of a rating scheme for the activities, but you could always use some subjective levels if ratings were desired. I don't know how you'd fill the table though without doing some kind of survey.
We need some user categories. For instance, I have lots of technical users who aren't computer programmers (by today's standards). (They graduated in the 60's and programmed with punchcards, but are pretty sure python is a kind of snake.) What are the user categories? Technical/non-technical, programmer/non-programmer, first time user/experienced users, etc. Others?
What about wiki activities? Account creation, logging in, navigating, editing, attaching files, etc.
We'll also need the observations themselves. I'm guessing this will tie together the user categories and activities with some plain text describing the issue. Is there any computer interface standard for doing this stuff?
How you can help
Look at the UsabilityObservations and try to make suggestions or write patches to solve issues.
If you happen to know usability better improve our UsabilityObservationTemplate
see also http://openusability.org