We need Unisa students to become editors to help fill in the content - see the new site for how to join.

This blog is no longer being updated. You can browse the archives if you’re interested in how WikiStudent was re-built.

A FireFox umbrella - how cool is that! Everyone I showed the pic to wanted one as well so I put in a bulk order to save on shipping. It was pricy (the total order came to over 100 Pounds) but worth it, considering that the proceeds go to the Mozilla foundation and this is a brilliant way to promote FireFox

If I had my way, everybody would use FireFox as their browser. Currently on average 20% of my visitors use FireFox which is just shocking…

A few weeks ago I mentioned blocking a bunch of spammer countries. I recently carried this out and it has been quite effective. Sometimes I’m tempted to block access to my websites to all non-FireFox users, but that would be too harsh, considering some people browse from their cellphones.

What I might do instead is this: Order dozens of FireFox umbrellas and re-sell them from my websites, and display monthly statistics of how many people are using FireFox. Just another one of my ideas…

There are five important things you can do to make sure your users see – and understand – as much of your site as possible:

1. Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page
2. Take advantage of conventions
3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable
5. Minimize noise

The dynamic menu tree (if I can just get it working!) will be THE feature to indicate the clear hierarchy of the site. At a glance you’ll be able to see how big the site is (i.e. how many pages) and how they all fit in in relation to each other.

Then, I had the idea of creating MediaWiki tables on the module pages, where students could edit the table cells if they wanted to buy or sell a book. Here is an example:

The trouble, I found out when doing usability testing, is that the MediaWiki table syntax is very complicated, and anybody who has never edited a wiki before will be confused by

|| || || ||

and it doesn’t naturally occur to someone that you need to edit in the book details between the pipe symbols.

So, rather than make people read detailed instructions and expect them to master wiki markup for tables, I’m going to put a hold on the bookshop for now, and write a standalone bookshop in 2010, where anybody (not just WikiStudent editors) can sell their books.

This menu tree is absolutely vital to the site. I want it more than anything! Here is an example of a website that uses this menu tree. You can expand and collapse the folders as needed. This is perfect for WikiStudent, which will have over 100 Unisa modules in the menu, which don’t all need to be visible at once.

I’ll have to wait till next weekend and try again then. Maybe there will be more help on the MediaWiki talk page by then. Holding thumbs!

And it’s easily editable because you don’t have to mess with table syntax. All you do is type the date. e.g. 2009-10-13:::ALP101Q Exam

The purpose of this?

Well, if someone fills in the exam date for a module, I’ll know when to email everyone doing that module. Not really a ‘good luck for the exam’ email, but rather a request to come back to the wiki straight after the exam and put down all the questions you remember were asked.

Some improvements to be made:

1. I think the current year needs to be displayed at the top, next to the month. (Will have to modify the extension’s code for this)
2. It needs a proper design, maybe even the exam date highlighted. (Will need to look into the CSS)

We actually recognised each other, even though we’d only met once 5 years ago. I remember how it happened: She was posting a Unisa assignment, I approached her and told her she could submit them electronically (which she didn’t know), and I showed her how to log on to SOL (Students On Line it was called in those days, not myUnisa!) and of course I also told her about my Unisa website (called COSINE, not WikiStudent, in those days).

So, the upshot is, she’s agreed to do some usability testing for me :-)  She’s already graduated, but her input will still be valuable because I need testers who know how Unisa works and what students want.

The above snippet was taken from the ENN102E page. You see a heading “Contributors to this page” with usernames of everyone who ever edited that page (except for admin).

So that’s a neat solution for indicating who is taking which modules. You can also click on a person’s username to find out more about them (what they are currently studying, what work they’re doing on the wiki, view their photo…).

In the past, I had a section where you could insert your name if you were doing a particular module, but that was a manual process, so not many people went to the effort. This extension is ideal because your username is added automatically the moment you save your changes to a page.

Here’s the page he looked at (COS340A)

And here’s what I learnt:

Positive

1. He understood the picture of the teapot graphic (i.e. that it was related to the subject COS340A), even though he is studying languages, not computer graphics.
2. He liked the idea of taking a quiz about a subject.
3. He noticed all the [edit] buttons along the right-hand side of the page and wasn’t afraid to click on them.

Negative

1. He didn’t notice the tabs at the top of the page, so I had to point them out.
2. He thought the “discussion” tab was where you could e.g. complain about the lecturers. (It’s actually where you discuss the content and layout of the page, not a discussion forum!)
3. I asked him to try sell a textbook and he had no clue how to insert his name and book into a table. The wiki markup for tables with all those pipe symbols (||) is not intuitive!

Surprises

1. He said he would want to print the page, and clicked on the “printable version” link.
2. He thought that the assignment due dates calendar wasn’t necessary because myUnisa has this info.
3. He said “where are the other students?”. He wanted to see names on the page, of other people taking the course.

So, I’m off to make some changes to the layout of Unisa module pages…

To quote from page 134 of Don’t make me think:

Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none. Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site.

Very true!