Wikis and Barriers to Usability

(Adapted from a post I originally wrote for the tiddlyspot.com blog. I'm bunching all my stuff into this one site, so here it is again).

Wikis are great

There’s something special about wikis.

When I’m showing someone a wiki for the first time, they don’t understand it immediately. There’s this moment, usually a minute or two in, when it kind of.. clicks. They say something like “Ahh.. I see.” They suddenly realise that the page they’re looking at, right now, is editable. Easily. Immediately. By them.

I remember when it happened to me. Actually I can’t remember what wiki I was looking at, but I clearly remember suddenly, finally, realising that you could edit it, right there and then.

Inconvenience destroys motivation

Wikis can take advantage of even very low levels of motivation.

Imagine for a second you’re a bricklayer, reading a normal web page, or even a magazine article. The article is some instructions on how to build a brick wall. Now, because you’re a bricklayer, you might notice some inaccuracy or omission in the instructions. In a situation like that, I always get a tiny feeling of wanting to fix the problem — and I'd guess most people would be the same. But what exactly can you do to change it?

If you were highly motivated, you would plan out a way to get it changed. Maybe spend some time composing an explanation and justification of your issue. Then find out some contact details, and send your message to the magazine publisher or web site administrator. But you’re nowhere near that motivated. The barrier to contribute is too high. Instead, you just give up on the urge. Probably your irritation level goes up a bit. And that’s it.

Turning motivation into contribution

On the other hand, if you notice an error on Wikipedia’s bricklaying page, you can instantly act on your motivation to fix the problem: click edit, type, click save. You aren't all that motivated, but it's really easy to act — so you do. You feel empowered instead of irritated, and you have genuinely helped everyone else who turns to Wikipedia for their bricklaying info. The barrier to contribute was low, and several people’s lives just got a tiny bit better.

This is the thing that wikis do, the real magic: make it easy to contribute. It’s not like this special property is accidental; The Guy who invented wikis explicitly set out to (amongst other things) lower the barrier for making a contribution. You could say that the mode of interaction for “contributing” is very close to the mode for “viewing”, so swapping between them is not demanding.

There are other great things about wikis, to do with collaboration and group wisdom and whatnot, but I think the special sauce is this: a wiki is really easy to contribute to.

From a web page point of view, wikis lower the contribution barrier in another way: they save you from having to know HTML when you edit pages. In fact wiki syntax is usually quite carefully designed to make it easy to see how the page will look while you are editing — headings look like headings, bullet points look like bullet points.. you are relieved of some of the difficulty of trying to imagine how the page will look. Another little hurdle gone.

Wiki systems are hard to set up

There is still a problem, though. Just about anyone can contribute to a wiki that already exists, like Wikipedia. But wikis are great for personal information management too. What if our bricklayer wants to start a wiki for her own use? MediaWiki (the system that Wikipedia uses) is available, but it needs all sorts of things to run, starting with a web host. The barrier to getting a wiki started is still high — much higher than the barrier to contribute to a wiki already running.

In software there’s a kind of natural progression towards easy installation. The folk who host most of my web sites, DreamHost, have "one click" installations of MediaWiki and some other software (which sometimes turn out to be one click, then a bit of editing and copying files around). Instiki has “There Is No Step Three” as a catchcry. But there’s still a big barrier of having a web host to put it all on.

Enter TiddlyWiki.

A wiki without the setup barriers

TiddlyWiki sacrifices the collaboration aspect of most other wikis, which is a shame. But TiddlyWiki gets something wonderful in return: no installation. Seriously, no installation at all. The file you download from tiddlywiki.com is not an installation program, or a compressed bunch of files; it’s the thing itself — you just save it somewhere. Double-click, and you’re in.

All it needs a modern web browser, which means TiddlyWiki runs on pretty much any modern computer, running any OS. The barriers of hosting, installation and setup are removed. And it’s a wiki, so it’s still really easy to edit.

TiddlyWiki has other features — a focus on microcontent, easy customisation, a developer community producing an ever-increasing range of plugins — that all contribute to making TiddlyWiki a fantastic electronic notebook. It has found a strong following as a to-do-list manager amongst the GTD crowd.

It’s common for TiddlyWiki users to carry their wiki from computer to computer on a USB stick, and that’s where I was up to, 8 weeks ago. Then I started using "UploadPlugin" (a plugin for TiddlyWiki written by BidiX).. and suddenly, normal TiddlyWiki wasn’t enough.

A virtual USB stick for me

I never thought that plugging in a USB stick would start to seem like too much work, until I was able to stop doing it. I just didn’t want to do all the messing around finding the USB thing, plugging it in upside down, etc etc. Plus, I had to keep it on my keyring (or I’d forget to bring it), and that made it annoying to grab my keys for a quick trip away from my desk.

UploadPlugin changed all that. I put a single PHP file on my web host, copied the plugin into my TiddlyWiki, and suddenly I could save my TiddlyWiki to my web host as well as my USB stick. It’s offline like a normal TiddlyWiki, but online when I want that. I realised that UploadPlugin took away another significant barrier to me using my TiddlyWiki.

For people like me, who have a web site of their own, using UploadPlugin is already easier than installing a more traditional hosted wiki system, but not everyone has a web site. Actually having a web host was a final barrier to usability that I wanted to remove.

A virtual USB stick for everyone

A few weeks later I realised that a web site that let people use the UploadPlugin to upload their TiddlyWikis would actually be relatively easy to put together.. and when I described my plan to Simon he felt the same. Simon had registered the tiddlyspot.com domain a few months before, but hadn’t had a clear idea on what to do with it, so we threw something together — and the rest was pretty much inevitable.

Now, tiddlyspot.com offers TiddlyWiki hosting in a way that I think is flexible, easy, and useful. And it feels like I've been able to take away another significant barrier to using a wiki. There's still things I'd like to make better -- TiddlyWiki isn't great for collaboration, for example. But there are spectacularly talented people working on TiddlyWiki, and I'm completely confident there will be some big leaps made toward bringing multi-user functionality to TiddlyWiki.

It's a bright future.. and I'll see you there!