Results of user testing, and space handling in links

In some recent user testing we found that there was considerable
confusion in space handling within wiki links, e.g., when

    [Gary Snyder]

is parsed and turned into a link to a new page, that new page will
incorporate the space character as "%20". This is both rather
counterintuitive, and created a situation where there were now two
pages, GarySnyder and Gary%20Snyder. The users were very confused
by this, it really screwed with their idea of the value of a
WikiWord. One said "why the hell would I want to use a WikiWord
then?" She was quite frustrated that after making the investment in
trying to understand WikiWords, thinking she did, then having the
system not work as she'd have thought. I have to agree.

I've been looking around but can't find out how to turn off this
behaviour. Isn't there a setting somewhere to automatically remove
whitespace from links?

We also found that people had a great deal of difficulty understanding
how to create a new page. It wasn't that (once they understood the
idea of a WikiWord) the difficulty was in writing the link, it was
in the cognitive leap required to understand that in order to create a
new page one really needed to *first* create a link to it, which meant
editing a page. They didn't understand why there wasn't a New Document
or New Page button or menu command. We didn't want to suggest creating
page islands (and even described that in documentation, that wasn't
during testing read), but it was a very common issue.

Another thing was not understanding the difference between the three
main link presentations:  inbound, external and createpage links. I
would guess that understanding the latter might help in solving the
difficulty in creating pages.

This could probably be fixed by improving the documentation, but in
my own over-the-shoulder experiences I noted that few people actually
stop long enough to actually read a paragraph of text, even when it's
right in front of them -- they've been trained to look for menu
commands or buttons. If there's going to be documentation it should
be extremely terse, not written for geeks, i.e., no tech language. I
think a How To page for common actions as part of the normal distro
would be a good idea, with a link on the sidebar where users *might*
see it.

If anything else comes up I'll forward comments on.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com>                           ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

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