XWiki's User Experience
Design Process
The process involves the creation of specifications, analysis, mockups, partial prototypes and even final versions of the proposals made. The aim of these proposals are to improve XWiki's interface, look&feel, usability, experience and interaction.
- Design planning for improvements/features is made according to the current XWiki Roadmap
- Design discussions are made on the XWiki Chat or on the XWiki forum
- design discussions on the forum have proposal and/or ux as labels and are made in the Development category.
- Design proposals deliverables (use cases/requirements/mockups/prototypes) are located on Design wiki (example: [Proposal] Flamingo Skin)
UX Topics
Topics Definition
- User Experience answers the question, “Did the user have as delightful an experience as possible?”
- Usability answers the question, “Can the user accomplish their goal?” with effectiveness and efficiency
User Experience encapsulates all the other subtopics, but being very broad is also very hard to define it and quantify it by appropriate marking the JIRA issues. That's why 'ux' label is not recommended and is more specifically defined by the 'usability' label.
Usability is a subset of the overall User Experience, while Accessibility and Consistency (Standard is related to Consistency) are subsets of Usability. When labelling an issue choose the most specific topic.
Issues Labels
You can contribute and help us report issues within XWiki. There are several tags that can be added to a JIRA issue in order to mark it important from an user experience point of view: ux, usability, consistency, standard, wcag.
Initially these issues were marked using the 'keywords' field, but now this field is deprecated in favour of 'Labels' field.
- User experience (UX) involves a person's behaviours, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service.
- Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object.
- Keyword: usability (deprecated)
- Consistency states that things that are related should be presented in a similar way.
- Keyword: consistency (deprecated)
- Standard refers to defining elements that will be reuse throughout XWiki (like .xform) and applying them to existing interface elements
- Label: 'standard' - are elements that define/break the interface standard?
- Keyword: standard (deprecated)
- Label: 'standard' - are elements that define/break the interface standard?
- Accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools, and that they can contribute equally without barriers
- Label: 'wcag' (recommended) - are there accessibility problems users are facing while using the product?
Defining an 'usability' issue
- Usability issues refer exclusively to interface/front-end issues, since only these issues affect the end-user directly.
- The generic definition of an usability issue is if it is preventing the user from completing a task. This means the functionality is not usable and thus useless.
- Improvements on a specific functionality are also considered usability issues if implementing that functionality will provide an obvious benefit to the user by making things clearer, easier to use, improving learnability, improving the way the user interacts with the system, boosting productivity etc.
- Most of the 'Improvements' issues are usability improvements, but this doesn't mean 'Bugs' or 'New Features' cannot be labeled as usability issues. Also we could have 'Improvements' that are not usability issues.
- So, in general, usability issues are front-end improvements that provide functionality that enhance the user's interaction with the product.
