Re: [Wikitech-l] VisualEditor deployment to 1000+ users: who wants the feedback?

On 29 January 2016 at 12:22, Daniel Barrett &lt;danb(a)cimpress.com&gt; wrote: ​Hey Daniel, Best of luck with the deploy! I plan to collect feedback from our users on what works and what doesn't. Broadly, feedback about the features (bugs, confusion, design suggestions, feature requests, enhancements, *etc.*) should go on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Feedback (though most people there are talking about Wikimedia wikis, as you might imagine). You can also give ideas directly onto Phabricator at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?projects=VisualEdi… if that's of interest. Feedback about the software (difficulties configuring it, *etc.*) generally go on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:VisualEditor as other sysadmins read there for advice, problem solving and recommendation sharing. ​Thank you. The team have done a great job, and it's great to hear people are happy.​ :-) ​They'll probably like even more guided, and eventually rich DOM, editing of template parameters based on TemplateData hinting​, which is something we're working on now (starting with title search-ahead). ​Yeah, this​ is something I'm not totally sold on how we can solve. Giving immediate access to all 20+ text styling options wouldn't be so great (overwhelming, and encouraging people to use rarely-used and indeed rarely-appropriate but valid options like <mark> or others; there's also the possibility for extensions to add to this list, so it's not trivial to make the design scale appropriately). We may re-visit this at some point. Suggestions and examples of this done well (or poorly!) elsewhere always welcome. :-) This is a pretty low priority for us, and coming up with a clean design that pushes users into (a) not using it at all, and (b) if they really must, strongly encouraging them to use %age-based columnar widths would take more time than it's worth to us. ​This was just completed this week into master, and will roll out to Wikimedia wikis this coming week, and will be part of the REL1_27 release.​ You can play with it at http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Table if you want a sneak preview. ;-) ​On first blush this looks like the changes we've made since REL1_26 have changed this issue a bit, but I'll look at it properly when it's not 22:45 on a Friday. ​One of the key design objectives of the VE project has been, since the start, moving towards making editing a simple and easy and as close as possible to reading; as part of this, the visual separation between modes is intentionally light-weight and indeed we're thinking long-term about ways to initiate editing on a smaller scale than "the page" – something like an edit button against each paragraph which lets you edit and exit quickly. ​ ​Yes, right now the "save" step is pretty heavy-weight, partially as part of our desire for Wikimedia wikis to ensure that people are consciously and intentionally publishing onto the Internet forever. I've done some thinking about moving the licence-acknowledgement step up-front into a one-time only thing, and so making saving much less heavy-weight a process. This kind of change is likely to be necessary for any future ventures into the equally exciting and concerning epic product changes related to real-time collaborative editing. In the mean time, a double-press of the keyboard shortcut will bring it up and immediately initiate save, though that doesn't exactly fix the issue raised.​ ​Hope this helps!​ ​Yours, -- James D. Forrester Lead Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester