Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Why are text styles hidden in a drop down?

5
170.29.64.4 (talkcontribs)

I'm a big fan of VisualEditor. We use it internally at my work with our two wikis. So please take this criticisms as a positive and honest inquiry.

It seems counterintuitive to hide common text style options such as bold and italic. Common editing interfaces else ware (WordPress, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc.) show the basic tools on the tool bar. The design decision in VisualEditor seems to skew toward those that are aware of, and conformable with, keyboard shortcuts.

Are there metrics being tracked that show what interface elements are used the most when editing wiki content? Is my situation 'weird' in that my wiki editors do use the menu and apply text styles frequently?

Is this VE design decision to dissuade editors from mucking with text styles?

Don't roll your eyes, but I support and educate co-workers with an internal wiki as part of my work responsibilities. This is #2 the most confusing issue* folks have when editing a page, they have to first discover where the options are and then click again to apply.

    1. 1 is not being able to edit tables. :)
TheDJ (talkcontribs)

I suspect this might be a side effect of the 'Wikipedia' focus, where using styling is indeed at least frowned upon. The options are all hidden under a common 'Text styling' drop down. Perhaps long term this should be a bit more configurable (or perhaps it already is, but I don't know about it.)

Elitre (WMF) (talkcontribs)

My 2c: I use the new Gmail, and styles are "hidden" there as well. While the toolbar's design (as pretty much everything in VE) is not definitive yet, it is really important that it stays as simple as possible (and adding at least 2 more buttons there can lead to chaos :) ). The wikitext toolbar has icons for bold and italics, but lacks the other features. What you are more likely to click highly depends on what is your typical wiki-activity, so we need to find a balance. This said, please do suggest alternatives. Thanks!

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)
Perhaps long term this should be a bit more configurable

Yeah; one suggestion has been to have user-level configuration of toolbar preferences (or even have the toolbar automatically reconfigure itself based on your personal frequency of tool use), but we've not looked at that work yet.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)
Are there metrics being tracked that show what interface elements are used the most when editing wiki content?

We did a review of typical MediaWiki content edits (across Wikipedias, Wikimedia's non-Wikipedia wikis, Wikia wikis, MediaWiki.org, and couple of others), looking especially at the frequency of use of the bold/italics tools against others. We made a judgement call that when we had them in the toolbar they were unnecessarily prominent compared to their use, and were crowding out other parts of the toolbar (like links) which are much more frequently used.

Is my situation 'weird' in that my wiki editors do use the menu and apply text styles frequently?

Certainly, it's quite different from our research, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. :-)

Is this VE design decision to dissuade editors from mucking with text styles?

Yes.

#1 is not being able to edit tables. :)

Working on it. :-)

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