Design Matters

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption=" [ Photo by designer-daily.com on div.topicpage.topicpage .col float: left overflow: hidden.topicpage #col1 margin-right: 30px width: 600px height: auto.topicpage #col1 .examplestory margin-right: 20px.topicpage #col2 width: 200px overflow: hidden height: auto.topicpage .inner #mainStory background: url('/public/img/topics/sxsw.png') no-repeat top left background-size: cover width: 570px height: 250px.topicpage #stories overflow: hidden height: auto.topicpage #col2 .examplestory .imgFrame height: 100px.topicpage #latestStories.storySnippets padding-top: 30px.topicpage h2 font-size: 13px.topicpage .examplestory img min-width: 100% min-height: 100%.topicpage .examplestory width: 175px margin-bottom: 5px.topicpage .examplestory h2 width: 157px margin: 4px font-size: 11px.topicpage #col2 .examplestory height: 100px width: 220px margin: 0px.topicpage #col2 .examplestory h2 width: 200px margin: 1px background: rgba(85,168,188,0.6).topicpage #col2 .examplestory .image padding: 0 -webkit-box-shadow: none](https://s3.amazonaws.com/archive.timmmmyboy.com/uploads/2011/09/iphone-before-after.jpg)"][](https://s3.amazonaws.com/archive.timmmmyboy.com/uploads/2011/09/iphone-before-after.jpg)[/caption]

The digital storytelling "course" ds106 has relatively quickly evolved into a community in the past year. With entities like #ds106radio appearing and developing new ways to broadcast to internet radio and the website being a mismash of latest posts and course-specific content I wondered out loud if there was a better way of organizing the information for people who are new to the community. Radio has a document that is quickly becoming overwhelming in and of itself. Is a wiki the best tool for this?

I don't want to discount the uses of a wiki here. I understand when it comes to rapid development of documentation collaboratively they're a great tool. But it seems that more often than not wikis require you to learn an alternative programming language involving brackets and asterisks to format your content. Media Uploads can be a pain. The user experience is not inviting and often invites work training users and ultimately frustration. Sites like [PBworks](http://pbworks.com/) and [Wikispaces](http://www.wikispaces.com) have alleviated this to some extent, but they're hosted solutions with a business model to unlock certain features. Whether they would work in this case better than MediaWiki is perhaps unknown.

This is a very interesting topic and it's definitely a balancing act that is different for each support person. I'm the type of person that immediately shoots for "Make it elegant and simple for users, because they're the ones I'm relying on to make great things." I can't speak for others but there is certainly a backlash from folks who don't want to "coddle the user" and rather throw them into the fire so they become better learners. Teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them. Tom Woodward clarifies this balance perfectly in a tweet:

So we have a few options here. We can increase the value of a product or we can reduce pain. Using #ds106radio as an example I feel like it has enough value that people have accepted the difficulty of getting online. However that hasn't stopped someone like Grant Potter from working with more advanced methods of running a PBX server so users can use any phone line to get on the radio, rather than purchasing software and getting a long list of settings correct to get online. The problem I see is that in terms of wiki software, MediaWiki has an extremely poor user interface and it takes a lot of honest hard work to mold it into a product that removes that pain for the user. Apparently some folks disagree with me.

Clearly UBC has done two-fold with its system. They've spent a lot of time working with MediaWiki to turn it into something that is easy to create pages and edit them. As someone who as installed MW before I can confirm their implementation is nothing like what MW is out of the box. And thats fine! But that's not for everyone. It's also very likely that UBC sees a lot of value in that wiki (or at least a subset of that group who may be very actively involved in it). But see those statistics don't defend the product.

And here I completely disagree. There is **not enough** emphasis put on design in products. I was often told how much better Android would be as a phone platform because it was more "open" and users had more options. The opposite is true after 1.5 years of using and Android phone (with 2.5 years prior experience on an iPhone). Design Matters. Especially so when the product you are working with is one that will require the input and involvement of a large set of users. Users who are likely not the geek that you and I are.

Is it fair for us to say "K12 can't handle this, but The University totally can." If a product is designed well enough it can be adopted by anyone. Google Docs does this well. Facebook does this well. Why can't wikis do this well?