Our friend Michael Angeles at urlgreyhot discusses his frustration with current technology, and his switch to wikis for a personal knowledge inventory:
“After spending a little time yesterday trying to add links to my weblinks directory and then filing them under my Drupal book pages, I think it’s time to start using a wiki.”
You can read more from his weblog entry discussing his switch.
Along with weblogs, we are trying to advocate the use of wikis within organizations for Knowledge Management Systems. We have found them to be a very powerful tool and can be even more powerful when combined with weblogs. However, like any other tool they are only as useful as the people who use them so if they go unused, don’t blame the technology, blame the implementation strategy.
About Mike Rundle
The main trouble I see in wikis right now is the lack of a “friendly-User-Interface” for users.
In the very moment that a Six Apart-like company build a nice and clean wiki implementation, the wiki hype will explode.
Even though we utilize “off the shelf” open-source Wiki packages, we tend to rip the code apart, change it all around, and then change the information architecture and user interface to fit the users’ needs.
We’re sticklers for great user interface design, and wouldn’t let any weblog or wiki package go out the door without our mark of approval.
I think the great thing about currently available packages is that you can customize the entire look and feel on your own. We can integrate branding and color schemes seemlessly into our installations, and make it seem as though it’s a totally custom-written app — which sometimes it is.
We understand that the default user interface for many wiki packages is lacking, so we change as much as needed in order for it to be usable and pleasing to the eye.
I personally don’t think anyone would hire us if we didn’t make our applications easy to use :)
It would be nice to see some examples of the type of interfaces that you produce for wikis. All the wikis that I have seen look atrocious and seeing some elegant designs would be great.
I agree with Jeff and Andr3s on this, the default templates (and hence the first introduction) to many Wikis is awful. A bit of Times New Roman, blue underlined links and poor layouts. It puts me off wanting to download and try one.
Having said that, I usually try and find a list of people using said Wiki software and you can see some reasonable styles at least, but even then, most are the default hunk of junk. Another reason for creating a readable, if not stylish, default template?
I’m also concerned that potential users will have trouble remembering and using the various ways to format text and create links. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Maybe it would be interesting add a bunch of javascript shortcut ALA GMail instead of this awful styles to introduce text.
Im completely agree with Lee. When I see the first page of any wiki, I remember the old days of Mosaic… :-)
Off-the-shelf wiki packages have obtuse user interfaces, and that really bothers us since we’re usability geeks. We’ve got some stuff cooking, so stay tuned :)
You’ve struck a great point Lee, the way that text is rendered, and the strange formatting system introduced in many wikis is often very different from any others. John Gruber’s Markdown looks really good — I’ve played with it a bit and it’s actually very intuitive.
Personally, I actually prefer Textile. We use it a lot because it’s already integrated into Basecamp, so the learning curve was nil. Anybody else have their own preference?