Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Gokan Ozcifci — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:16:21 GMT

Ed,

I agree with you .. Having an article with different colors and font sizs is not the spirit of a wiki.. ok, i'm convinced we need guidlines..

Thanks for you limitless share and comments :)

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Ed Price - MSFT — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:58:02 GMT

One more example: the font issue came up because there were so many articles in so many different fonts. There were also many articles with different fonts in the same article. And different font sizes. And different colors! And different color highlights! When all was said and done, you couldn't even read some articles.

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Ed Price - MSFT — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:56:07 GMT

Another one that Ana brought up on this blog is personalization in wiki articles. We want to encourage some credit, but if wiki articles are about how someone thought of a great idea when they were taking a shower, then it pulls them out of the content and away from the purpose. That's the voice you'd expect from a blog. So we encourage you to post such commentaries in a blog and include the more factual version on the Wiki. It's actually synergetic that way... it sends people to the blog for ther personal story and to the wiki for the more factual data that they can collaborate on. Also, another point we mentioned, if the content is too personal, then people don't feel that they can contribute, which defeats the purpose of the wiki.

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Ed Price - MSFT — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:53:03 GMT

Gokan, it's a good argument. But it's inevitable for a wiki. Like Wikipedia is full of guidelines. The point being that in a wiki you're reading a community encyclopedia, and so if every page is so different that you have to re-think how to navigate it, then you'll stop reading. The guidelines were built from need, and not before the need. For example, we had hundreds of articles flowing through without a technology name in the title. So 50 articles named "Error Message" becomes a huge problem. Thus the guidelines work to solve that. And so on.

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Horizon_Net — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:10:42 GMT

I don't think that these guidelines limit creativity. For me creativity in an article comes more from the style of writing instead of the appearance. But the good thing about guidelines is that they only this, guidelines.

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Gokan Ozcifci — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:42:40 GMT

Jan,

Do you think that Guidelines limits our originality? I think if everybody uses "the" guidelines every article will be the same and the creativity.. no?

re: Community Win: User Experience Guidelines

Bruno Lewin - MSFT — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:50:24 GMT

It's been way too long since I had looked at this article. Thanks so much for the reminder, Jan.