[TYPO3-hci] Backend in "Mambo"-Mode

[Alex Heizer]

Hi,

I'm starting from the original post since a lot of people have expressed 
a lot of ideas/opinions, and I wanted to just explain my experiences 
with editors learning and using the BE interface.

I've trained, to date, a few hundred "ordinary" editors to maintain T3 
sites. These people ranged from skilled computer users with years of 
experience working on computers and networks, all the way down to one 
user who had purchased his first computer the month before and I had to 
train him through MSN Messenger. I've trained people to use a lot of 
extensions, including news, direct mail, workflow and the chc_forum. In 
only a few cases (two that I can recall at the moment) did the editor 
take more than 1/2 hour to train to do all the tasks they needed to 
perform, and one of the two who had difficulty with the training did so 
because she was used to the old way of working with a website and 
couldn't wrap her mind around the differences between Adobe GoLive and a 
CMS. The other who had difficulty just kept forgetting things, in general.

Like any training, whether it's for driving a car, making dinner or 
using a complex piece of software, the training needs 3 elements to be 
successful:
1. A good UI that allows a user to do a task rather than figure out how 
to use the system.
2. A good teacher who knows the system well enough to present the tasks 
clearly, without hesitation.
3. A good teacher who knows the target audience well enough to translate 
technical knowledge into "ordinary" language for the audience.

Looking at each one individually:
1. TYPO3 has one of the best interfaces, in terms of usability. Yes, 
there is a lot of stuff there to confuse new editors if an admin doesn't 
restrict what they see, but that is because of the depth of features 
TYPO3 has. Like anything else, the more stuff you have, the more space 
you need to store it if you want easy access to it when you need it. 
Since someone with less than a month of computer experience (a complete 
novice in all aspects of the word) is able to not only learn how to edit 
their site in 30 minutes of training over MSN Messenger, but is able to 
intuit how to do things he hasn't been shown the next day on his own, 
this is an indication that for someone interacting with the interface 
with no preconceptions the interface is intuitive and well-designed. So 
any UI difficulties may be assumed to be a result of preconceptions on 
the part of the user (see point 3, below). The UI needs to facilitate 
tasks, and a big button with a little drawing on it may not be intuitive 
just because it's big and in the middle of the page. There are hundreds 
of poorly-designed icons floating around out there, but when I have told 
editors "click on the pencil to edit an existing record", they have gone 
straight for the pencil icon each time.
2. In order to be "good", a teacher needs to know how to teach, and they 
can be better or worse depending on what it is being taught. Someone 
good at teaching language may not be good at teaching physics. So the 
teacher needs to know the system well enough to not be stumbling around 
during training, looking for what they are trying to demonstrate. 
Presenting the tasks clearly in 1-2-3 format goes a long way in helping 
someone learn "click Page, click the page name in the tree, click the 
New Content button".
3. In order to be "good", a teacher also needs to know the target 
audience well enough to translate any technical knowledge into terms the 
user will understand. Many people who work in an office on a computer 
only work on computers because it's the tool that helps them do their 
job. Often, they say "computer" when they're talking about the monitor, 
and have no idea what a "CPU" is. "Click-and-drag" can be an alien term 
to them, and many of them leave documents open when they leave work for 
the day, so saving after entering each content record may not be 
something they would naturally think to do. Just knowing to specify 
"click with the left mouse button" instead of "click here" can sometimes 
help a new editor learn the system more quickly.

Perhaps "improvements" to the HCI don't have to mean changing what we 
already have, but may instead mean training aids for those who have to 
train editors. In other words, resources for an admin to help them learn 
the system and be able to teach it to their editors more quickly. Being 
a new user doesn't mean they are a stupid user, just that they need to 
learn how to do a limited number of tasks they didn't know how to do 
before. Maybe the documentation and video collections can be reviewed 
with this in mind, to develop an additional set of documentation 
designed for training editors rather than developers and administrators.

Just my 22cents. :)

Alex


Fabrizio Branca wrote:
> Hi List,
> 
> what about having different modes for displaying the backend?
> 
> Non-Admins could have a really simple interface with large icons.
> 
> For example: A news-icon could lead directly to a predefined sysfolder 
> with the options "list news" and "create new news item"
> 
> Bye,
> 
> Fabrizio