Survey: Dislikes

While we didn't mind seeing the few users who were sucking up and said that nothing was bad enough to drive them crazy, we know there are always things that we could be doing better. So without further ado...

The Editor

Mentioned by 20% of people as their first choice, various glitches, bugs and other weirdness in the WYSIWYG editor was the number one complaint. While this has been getting better in the last few versions (in particular 6.5.1 fixed a lot of copy/paste issues), we've obviously got more work to do here.

On our end this has been a challenging one to get right, but obviously its hugely important to do so. With the variety of different browsers and their versions, not to mention different ways that people are using ProjectForum, we've been beefing up our testing systems and processes to better capture the various special cases that are causing grief.

One thing that you can do to help is let us know when you see an error and as best you can, describe what is needed to reproduce it. Reproducing it is usually the tough part in any bug; after that, fixing it tends to be much easier. In particular we need to know:

• what web browser (and version) you're using
  
• what was in the page (preferably the 'wiki markup' version) before you saw the problem (the 'versions' feature can help with this)
  
• what you did (where you typed, what buttons you hit, etc.)
  
• what was in the page after, and when it's not obvious, what you expected to see
  

Other Dislikes

The second area that was mentioned was how difficult it can be to keep things organized. To some degree, this is endemic in any wiki-like system. Many people use ProjectForum in a mostly hierarchical manner, and so expect it to be easier to be able to jump to the 'next' page, go 'up', etc. We're definitely open to suggestions as to how this might be made easier to do.

Some aspect of 'user accounts' was mentioned by a few people, often related to how they might be hooked into an existing authentication system that is being used elsewhere (a feature available in our Enterprise version, but not the standard one). Also in that category was supporting groups of users, better user management, etc.

Requests for more formatting options was another common complaint. To some degree, this becomes almost a philosophical issue. While obviously adding more formatting to PF is technically very easy to do, we've been trying to stay fairly conservative in that regard. We view ProjectForum primarily as a communication and collaboration tool, not a document preparation tool. The more people are spending time messing with formatting, the less they're likely focusing on communication. And if pages are full of fancy formatting, they also make it more difficult for other people (especially those not as used to the system) to contribute and make changes. It's the same reason that rough drawings and sketches make it easier to discuss and change diagrams than a fully rendered 3D image would.

Other things that were mentioned once or twice: hard to link to files on network drives, security model, proprietary database (which isn't at all true actually), difficult to set up, lack of support, poor extensibility, lack of a published API, too high a price, no PDF export, unfamiliar terminology, can collect spam, not enough tutorials.

That was about it for dislikes. Next time we'll wrap up with a few suggestions and other miscellaneous nuggets we found in the survey responses.

Comments

[Pancho]

Hmmm...

You say: "To some degree, this becomes almost a philosophical issue. While obviously adding more formatting to PF is technically very easy... We view ProjectForum primarily as a communication and collaboration tool, not a document preparation too."

There is so much overlap between the these activities that making a distinction is limiting to the first two. We are using PF to compose proposals collaboratively. We then give access to clients to the wiki space to deliver the proposal. But it's hard to have this presentation look and print good, so we still often end up exporting the content to a word processor or page layout software to make it look good. After enjoying the wiki, this last step seems regressive, is painful, and precludes further possible effective collaboration in this most critical part of the process.

[Ian Yorston]

"The second area that was mentioned was how difficult it can be to keep things organized."

I'm sure there must be a "category" solution. I seem to recall that there is a way to do "categories" in PF/CF but I've never figured it out - so it fails the simplicity test that PF/CF passes so well in all other aspects !

Categories display very nicely in Wikipedia. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Categories. On the other hand it's less obvious how to add categories to a particular page.

If PF/CF could solve this then that would be a huge step forward.

Perhaps we could have a header/footer-bar for "categories" together with auto-complete. (Delicious seem to present tags very well).

[Ian Yorston]

Any chance that CF/PF might use UserVoice or GetSatisfaction to track ideas for improvement ?

I can't help feeling that the user-base need some way to encourage each others good ideas !

[Mark Roseman]

Not sure if this helps at all (from the user guide...):

You’ll notice one of the pre-defined templates is called “Category Template”; this helps you create category pages. Category pages are a useful way to help you organize your forum, by pointing to a set of other pages that all relate to the same topic. For example, you’ll also find that there is a page called “Category Help” which points to all the other pages in the forum that contain help information.

You can create these sort of index pages explicitly of course, by adding a set of links to the page. This is known as “top down” style, where the index page specifies what pages belong to the category.

Category pages just provide a different way to do the same thing, but in a “bottom up” style. Instead of specifying what pages to link to in the category page itself, every other page can make a link to one or more category pages (usually these links appear at the bottom of the page). If you look at one of the category pages, you’ll see it contains a line saying “[references:]”, which automatically creates a list of all pages that link to that page—so the category page gets built for you.

Both top-down manually created index pages and bottom-up category pages essentially do the same thing, and each have their place. Different groups will prefer one or the other (or both, depending on the situation).

[Paul Read]

>"The more people are spending time messing with formatting, the less they're likely focusing on communication."

The reason I choose Project Forum over a number of the other Wiki's is exactly that - it does not let people waste time 'messing with formatting'. Don't do it!