Scoop: The need for usablity
By coryking , Section Project [] Posted on Fri Dec 05, 2003 at 12:00:00 PM PST
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.

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. Preferences: I'd like to get rid of as many preferences as I can. All of these preferences should be found under a single page clearly marked as "options" or "preferences". The only few I can justify keeping are: Bio "fake email" homepage timezone themes... maybe... digests... this preferences should be admin-enabled first.. not all sites need this.. pgp? Please... only 13 users on photographica set that. Does your Artist know what the hell pgp is? Nope. The English major posting to a literature site? Nope. Does a bunch of hippie vegetarians posting to vegidot.org know what the hell pgp is? What about the dope smokers at smokedot.org? Nope... zzzzzzzt... gone. Every option added to scoop should pass through this list. If these people don't know what the hell it is... it doesn't belong in scoop. Comment Systems: Offer two comment systems that are mutually exclusive and that only the admin can change. Dynamic comments ala scoop. These would function just like the comment system does now. I would like to keep the post/reply functions on the same page and use JavaScript an IFRAME's to have the reply box "drop down" beneath each comment. Preview? I think we can accomplish this with a popup box that shows the comment, does the spell-check thing, etc. When the comment is posted, the preview box closes and the comment is tacked to the end of the thread with no page reloading. Because of the added bloat for little return, I'd also like to make the JavaScript based dynamic comments the *only* way to view comments on scoop sites. People who have JavaScript disabled (as I do) can enable it for scoop sites. We are used to it.. trust me. If you are adamantly opposed to JavaScript for whatever reason - viewing a scoop site is the least of your worries. Remember that I think scoop should target a general audience, not the fringe .0005% of the population. I hedge on this however because I don't know how well the dynamic comment system works for people using screen readers. Perhaps we detect JavaScript, if it's off then we offer the nested comment view - I really hate that view though as I've been spoiled rotten by dynamic comments. "Flat" comments ala photographica. These would be simple and flat. They too have the post comment textbox on the bottom of each thread. They to post without reloading the page. Since these are for smaller sites, there will be two presentation methods based on another admin set preference. Ratings: The rating system should be an admin preference. Admins can enable it or disable it. When I first installed scoop for photographica, I was quite surprised I couldn't turn off ratings. Course, then I went ahead and made story ratings... which I think I'm gonna pull out... If ratings are enabled, all users get the system (I'm not getting into anonymous vs registered though). None of this wishy washy letting the users enable or disable it. If they don't like the ratings (which most general users don't) and it's enabled... tough... they can deal with it. Comment Sorting: I propose that we completely remove any customized sorting. Comments should be sorted oldest to newest with the "post new comment" box being at the end of the comment section to hopefully force a poster to read the existing comments. All users should view the comments in the same order simply so that the conversation looks the same to everybody. Not only that, but the whole "sort bar" adds yet another bit of interface bloat that only caters to a small percentage of the user base. Story Systems: Offer two story systems that are set at install time. The current system complete with the whole story voting system. A simplified system that does away with the story voting system and either allows a group of editors to decide what to post, or just outright posts them (and the editors then clean up crapfloods). Extended Body: I also propose way to disable the extended body for sites like photographica and "link sites" that don't have a lot of text in them. If the extended body is disabled AND "flat comments" are enabled, I'd like to have the comments drop down on the topic/front page like they do on photographica. Move junk around: Don't know the best way to organize this yet. I am thinking something close to what I've done on http://scooplite.xlan.org HTML: We need to get rid of HTML. I propose we incorporate of the the many free WYSIWYG editors on the open source market. For example: htmlarea (http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/) would suit the needs of scoop perfectly and is easy to add and remove the tags it allows. However, most of these wysiwyg editors only work on IE and Mozilla. Scoop would have to detect when one of those two browsers are not being used and simply offer the regular edit box. 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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