Designing a templated wiki which aims to make the process less scary and bafflilng. Presented to the Information Design Conference at Greenwich, UK in April 2012
1. a case study in managing user-contributed information on a public
website
Mark Barratt | Text Matters | Information Design Conference 2012
2. Help people working in voluntary organisations
share their knowledge
In a useful format
With a process that is inclusive and accessible
Including peer review/rating
And peer updating
By making ‘wikiable’ content more usable
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
3. Politics: helping people work together painlessly
Economics: curation of knowledge is expensive
and time-consuming: anything which may help is
useful
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
4. Authority plus comment
Corrections hard to integrate
and attribute
Potentially-important comments
off the visible page
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
5. Bulletin board on the web
Appropriate for developing ideas
Useful stuff distributed in a thread
Not useful for reference or how-to articles
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
7. Website for people in the voluntary sector
‘Everything and everyone you need to know to run
a nonprofit’
Launched April 2009
5000+ pages of reference and learning material
26,000+ UK registered users
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8. First web
browser/
editor
1990
What’s the
point of just
reading?
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
9. First ‘wiki’ 1994
‘...not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors.
Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an
ongoing process of creation and collaboration
that constantly changes the Web site landscape.’
Wikipedia 2001
Not a mass-participation sport
Wikipedia participation rate 0.02%
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
10. Wikipedia
WikiHow (and its peers)
Lots of closed & special-interest groups
er, that’s it
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
11. Focus on dialogue not co-composition
Email 1971
Bulletin Boards 1978
CompuServe, The Source, 1979
TheGlobe (1995) SixDegrees (1997) failed
Friendster 2002
MySpace 2003
Facebook 2004
Twitter 2006
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
12. Nothing fatal, but most web users ignorant,
daunted, or baffled
Wiki markup in some wikis:
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
13. Avoid wiki markup: make it feel like Word
Provide guidance on document structure to help
both readers and writers
Make participation obvious and not scary, without
buggering up prime function of documents – to be
read
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
14. Clear user requests: just tell me how to do X
Wanted to test hypothesis:
Structured documents helpful
Step-by-step instructions
Budget for lab-based user testing
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
21. ‘Normal’ site content
Three new sections made wikiable
Provide ‘content types’ choice for new pages
Include discussion and history
Signal wikiness without overwhelming scan-and-
read functions
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
23. No budget for labs
Small test groups
Paper prototypes
Revise and retest rapidly
From paper to ‘test server’ ASAP
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32. Wikiable sections termed iKnowHow & promoted
Much tweeting and blogging ‘iKnowHow’
Previews at conferences/meeting
Editorial in Guardian Society online
Adoption of ‘Blue Dots’ incentives for contributors
Quiet arm-twisting of likely contributors
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
33. First wikiable articles available 14 March 2012
First-month participation rate well above
Wikipedia’s, both
Edits of existing articles
Creation of new articles
No usability problems reported. None.
Likely to get quiet and build (if at all) slowly
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
34. Fail early, fail often strategy works
Two planned features not (yet) in the iKnowHow
service:
Rating and reputation for content and
contributors. Wicked problem
An interactive glossary not yet ready/easy to use
Otherwise ‘too early to say’.
Mark Barratt | Text Matters
35. This stuff is hard
Information/interaction design can make it fail
It can’t make it succeed.
You need a great client: in this case the KnowHow
NonProfit digital team at NCVO (National Council for
Voluntary Organisations)
Mark Barratt | Text Matters