Scoop: The need for usablity
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By coryking , Section Project [] Posted on Fri Dec 05, 2003 at 12:00:00 PM PST
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I have watched as countless scoop sites get created and watched as their owners sink inordinate amounts of time into their community hoping for it to blossom, only to watch it fail. I don't think the majority of these sites fail due to the owners negligence, but simply that scoop is not suited to a general audience which these people are attempting to target. I firmly believe that we can make scoop easy for a general audience to use.
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What's Wrong?
Scoop, being a now distant derivative of Slashcode, was built for a technical audience. It is easy to demonstrate this by simply by looking at the myriad of options if offers a user. While scoop works great for a technical audience - Kuro5hin, Husi, etc - the system works. But when scoop is unleashed on a general audience (photographica.org), the results are less the optimal. I would like to propose we fix these issues so that scoop can target a much broader audience.
It has been over a year and a half that since I ported photographica.org from an old Grey Matter site into a scoop site and there are many things about scoop that I have observed which detract from scoop's usability. I list them below and then go into some detail over what I think we can do to fix it.
- Comment System: Comments are far to separated from the story content. On an out of the box scoop install, it takes three screens to get from the front page to where you can post comment. In fact, out of the box, the first link in the chain doesn't even say you can post a comment by clicking on it. If you look at some sites, they've changed this labeling to invite a user to post.
- Options: There are far to many options. Yes, options are good for us technical folk, but for an average joe - they are useless. In fact, worse then useless - they add visual clutter and additional pages to navigate. I've done a simple analysis of photographica, who targets a very broad audience and found the following
- 6 out 2004 users have changed the "show topic" pref to something other then the default (Yes or blank)
- 16 have set comment_dthreaded_to
Why do we have these options when nobody uses them? Sure you can argue "oh yea, well I use them...!!!!" - but they are a waste. They bloat the code and interface when less then percent of a userbase will actually set them. Will a photographer who barely knows HTML use them? Will that PolySci major posting to your site use them? Why should we cater to the fringe, the .1% tail end of the bell curve at the expense of the rest of our userbase?
- Labeling: Quick fix. "User Preferences" link becomes "Edit User Info". "Display Preferences" becomes "Edit Interface Preferences". Consistency is a key to good design and scoop should strive to label things using the same name throughout the site. Failure to do so will confuse a user who assumes that because they are named differently they are, well, different.
- Ratings: This is going to be the controversial one. Ratings. I think for all but the largest websites, ratings are a waste of space. While kuro5hin has the lofty goal of self-administration, most websites have admins that are more involved in the content of the website. Not only that, but I suspect the majority of internet users have not figured out what the hell ratings are. Worse, they can offend those with thin skin, a poor idea for a non-technical audience who doesn't participate in the flame fests of kuro5hin or Slashdot (or hell, even usenet). Once those people get pissed, they stop visiting, and stop commenting.
- Threading: This is the second controversial one. For more sites, I think threaded comments are an overkill. I have found that my userbase prefers the flat comments and most *non-technical* people I speak with prefer them as well. Besides, when you get 10 or 15 comments per story, isn't the whole threaded thing kind of a waste?
What can we do?
Ok... By now, you are probably pissed... "who the hell is this guy?" But It's OK, I'd like to address many of these. Some I already have, and have even tested them.
First - take a look at my beta site: scooplite.xlan.org This already implements a comment system that has about doubled the number of comments seen on photographica.
The need for help
There is one thing that I need to be done before I can implement the comments and stories in a fusion that keeps ScoopLite part of Scoop: We need a common API to allow the easy hookage of different comment and story systems. Don't know how to do this... I'll leave that to somebody else :-)
Many of these issues should be very easy to fix, and I am more the willing to fix many of them personally. Simply by reducing the number of options, clearing out the clutter, and simplyfying comment posting we can increase the activity our "customers", those who use scoop, experience on their websites. Scoop has the potential to be something great, it has a rich and flexable API, a wonderful template and box system, and smart and talented team of developers.
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