Discussion Group

Usability v. Unreason
I like to read stuff online, and for some reason a lot of the stuff I read online is by programmers. As a writer, you'd think I'd be reading other writers' website, but for some reason there are a lot of programmers in there. Part of that is my reliance on the weblogs.com feed on the links page, which is heavily biased towards programmers. The feed I use is soon to go away (Dave wants websites to provide an XML or SOAP feed before very much software is in place to support it, so it'll be even more geek-biased), which gives me a reason to go find some new places to read every day.

But, hell, I'm a geek and some of those programmers are pretty good writers. A very good writer is Joel Spolsky, who's been writing on good programming practices. Now he's started a series of stories about the development of his company's flagship product, CityDesk. All right! That's the kind of insight into someone's mind we need more of, not less. Which reminds me that it wouldn't kill me to do more of that concerning story writing. A writing website where I don't focus much on writing is a poor writing website indeed.

But I digress. We get to the heart of the matter with Working on CityDesk, Part 2. Joel is railing on discussion group software.

Certainly in the early days, learnability and simplicity are our priority. When I looked a bunch of discussion boards, I found that most of them have their heritage in the BBS world, where the same people log on to chat for 4 hours every night. Those people love features like a geegaw that lets you put a graphical smiley in your posting, and the ability to upload snapshots of their ugly mugs to appear next to their postings, and the ability to click a button and never see postings by the blithering idiot who wrote this one again. All of these features are neat for power users but they just clutter up the interface for novices.

But I digress. So I'm reading how casual visitors and newbies to your discussion area really don't need auto-smilies, and I'm reading Joel rant on Discus (which I hate, it's a garbage interface, why do they use frames, why doesn't it paginate, why can't you bookmark anything?), and I hit this:

Finally I flirted with Manila, since we have it running anyway for our weblogs, and we've already written a little daemon which watches Manila and restarts it when it crashes (about once every two days). But (as far as we could tell) Manila requires membership to post a message, and in my experience that is enough to turn away 90% of the casual visitors who might otherwise use the discussion board. It would be great for small elite communities of people who all post all the time, but I don't want anything to get in the way of a beta tester casually reporting a bug.

As I've said previously, I spent a lot of time automating the bejeesus out of the publishing process here. By the end of today I'll have reached my personal goal of one-click publishing. You post a story, you tell me you want it published and what genre it goes in...and I click one button and it's all done. Published, indexed, and sent to the home page. What about usability? How easy is the publishing and discussion interface to use? Does everything make sense to anyone but me? I've noticed a trend recently of people coming here, reading a few things, going to make a reply or a new thread...and then stopping. They hit the "logon (or signup as a new member)" prompt, and bail.

I am conflicted. Obviously UBB users don't see signing up as a big deal. Is it a big deal? I like the fact that we're a cozy little corner of the web, but to be honest all, we're a little too cozy. When a group of Louisiana teenagers get buried in homework (or move to Japan, or move to India), the site goes cold. Part of that is a complete lack of advertising on my part. Is any part of that usability problems?

Here is the end of this winding path. I'm going to spend some time thinking. You all are going to spend some time thinking. I'm going to spend some time writing. You all are going to spen some time writing. And at this point, now that I'm happy with the publishing process, the new questions will be: "How can I make Unreason as easy to use as possible?", and "How can I make Unreason the best place for readers and writers that I can make it?"

Have a horrorshow day, my brothers. And take care of your loved ones.