Confluence User-Interface

Some time ago I got a mail from someone asking what I meant when I wrote "The out-of-the-box interface sucks big time" (see section on Confluence). I wrote back a long mail, but there was no follow-up reply, and because I've got several mail from people who also struggles with that very default interface, I have decided to post that mail here so that a) the information isn't lost, and b) you now know what I think about the Confluence default interface (at least before version 2.3). Also, we may package up our enhanced interface as an open-source thingy so that others can use it, but I'll have to sort some stuff out first. Here we go ;

> Could you elaborate some more on exactly what
> sucks about Confluence's UI so much to you?

Not so much to me, because I'm a geek, and with a bit of clicking and a bit of huffing I learn the paradigm of the interface and start using it. My users, on the other hand, hated it. Every test we did left them confused and uncertain about where to click next. My users are not geeks, nor incredibly computer litterate. And I'm an usability guy. Sparks surely would fly.

Maybe a few specifics are in order. I'll talk about some of the biggies ;

Where am I? If we are true to the Wiki form, every page is a page, but in Confluence this is not so; there are pages, label-pages, news, configuration, reports, and so forth. How does the interface reflect where you are and state you're in? The breadcrumb is really the only way that this is reflected, apart from the content (or sometimes hints within it) itself. but the difference between the content parts are cognitive hard to tell apart; the information shape is too similar across them all, and so we become relient on analysis of content instead of cognitive recognition. (basically the tabs aren't clear enough, nor consitently "content" based as sometimes you use them for functionality, and the same real-estate and concept is swapped depending on what you do and wherer you are)

Further on to this is the confusion people have when they're on a page and they can't edit it. (Difference between a page and a news item, or even a list of labels when things get a bit unclear) using tabs as functionality is also confusing here. A bigger problem occurs after some use of the system; why does a page have four function based tabs when "pages" is one of many content tabs? Where did my page go? Aren't pages part of the space? What is the difference between a page and a news item? And I could go on and on about using titles of pages as persistant links and the tree-structure imposed. :)

Why can't I label stuff as "fish fingers, bollocks" as with Flickr? Why can't we do controlled vocabularies? (This stuff isn't that hard to do; we've hacked Confluence to support it!) How can we do facetted navigation which better suits complex Wikis? Why aren't there better ways of dealing with lots of spaces? Why is added metadata to a page so hard (and with macros, so ugly)? (In fact, why aren't there a really neat user interface to attach metadata to pages, like properties, using bandana? Macro properties only works with extreme geeks, not human beings!) I can go on and on, and I'm pretty sure that there's *good* answers for why things are the way they are, and I certainly understand that a lot of these things are hard to change as they become legacy. In fact, I suspect most of the default user interface is built up over time and no-one dares to change it because it is very complex and rigid. (For example, why are there no Velocity templates for dealing with labels? I suspect a rushed job?)

Having said that, though, Confluence is fantastically flexible, and can do pretty much everything we want it to do, but at some point we need to add users to it, and that's when things start to break down a bit. We can't embed metadata in content, as normal people would balk at the macro scripts!

As a technologist I understand every decision that has been made, why things work the way they work, and I can figure out how to do pretty much anything I like; I grasp the paradigms and I can get around the interface to make it do what I do. I understand that conceptually a page belongs under the "pages" tab, but the interface doesn't reflect this and adds confusion. I understand how I can use the system to create hidden pages to do special stuff, and then include that content into a column of special info, and so forth. I can figure out what files involve the labels (and just that they're called labels instead of tagging makes things further tricky; another word to learn that means the same as something else) and implement a scheme of local and global controlled vocabulary. I can figure out how to have access control outside the realms of user administration, or to do news aggregation across spaces and repurpose these in external applications, and more. But I'm telling you, it hasn't been an easy ride! :)

I brought Confluence and JIRA into this organistation, and we use them both, even in synch, and technically it fits us like a glove (although with a few added features it would make a better kill, of course), but the user interface failed again and again. People will not battle with a user-interface; they'd rather forget about the tool alltogether. In our scenario, these are normal plain people trying to do very plain stuff. They're not geeks. Even the very concept of a Wiki is scary to them, and as such the interface must be as gentle as possible.

...

Anyways, I could ramble on about the user interface, the cognitive challenges it imposes, the confusing paradigms, Confluence as part of a greater set of "web 2.0" tools (sorry for using that expression), information architecture in a Wiki world, persistant identification (and how Confluence fails especially through repurposing of content), facetted navigation, content semantics and news aggregation (which is a neat business model in itself!) and so forth. I don't mean to give the Confluence guys pepper (hmm, a Norwegian expression, I fear), but I've spent over a year in the complex belly of the beast in trying to make the interface reasonably user friendly for our very boring normal users. So, um, forgive me. :)

I am a rock

I am a rock. Gravity holds me down, and all I can do is observe. I watch things go on around me, things that over time polishes my rough surface smooth. I see things change, and I accept change as a natural state. I am too slow to object.

I once wanted to become a tiny sand grain, dropping in between other rocks, pushed along by water wherever it went, take me on adventures, and show me the way. But I realised - sometimes I think a bit too late - that after being a grain, that after the next step, there was nothing. A rock has no light youth, only a slow decaying distance between being something important and being nothing.

I am happy to be a rock. Everything changes, yet everything stays the same. Drip drip will turn me to a pebble. Time to move on.

Melbourne

I've just spent four days in Melbourne with Julie to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. The kids were dropped at friends and relatives (their godparents for two days, then their granddad for the other two), the dog taken care of, the garden watered, and the car stored away. We bought flight tickets online (which turned out to be a mistake) and booked and paid our hotel online as well (which turned out to be a smart thing to do).

We arrived at Melbourne Airport on friday morning, taking the SkyBus which dropped us to Spencer Street Station, and we walked to our hotel on Dudley Street. The hotel had a good reception area but really bad rooms and was located quite a big walk away from pretty much anything (and both of these things are not good factors when you're pregnant, so, yes, Julie is pregnant again), so we cancelled the next two nights, went to an internet cafe and booked ourselves into the Crossley Hotel on Little Bourke. Many thanks to the fantastic WotIf.com.au service for online hotel bookings, and the fantasticly friendly staff at our first hotel (which I won't mention by name).

I'm not going to go through all the little things we did and saw throughout the city, but I'll try to summarise it as best I can; we loved it! Melbourne is a beautiful city with a European feel to it, lovely people, not too busy (as Sydney, for example) and fantastic architecture and art everywhere you turned. I was quite taken with it.

One of the highlights for me was visiting the State Library of Voctoria, a fantastic building situated centrally and close to the university. What a feel and ambience! I spoke to some nice reference librarian about various bits and pieces, even talked about E-Resources and new search engines / interfaces, so if the library needs an manager / techie / EL1-2, I'm right there. :)

We ate and we ate and had coffees and drinks everywhere, too many to mention. the food was great everywhere, but the coffee highlight was indeed Pellegrino's (corner of Little Bourke and Crossley) who knew exactly how to make a mocha right! Thanks.

The Melbourne Natural Museum was also great. So was the art centre, although we missed most of the Australian Art that's somewhere else. I loved going on the trams, as Oslo (my hometown) also is a tram-town. I loved the arcades and the alleyways. We ate in one of them with live jazz music one night. Fantastic!

We went to Bennets Lane Jazz Club to see and hear Elena Stone Band which we knew nothing about. It turned out to be freakin' fantastic! Elena was a fantastic performer, singer and composer, and we enjoyed the concert so much. I noticed that the drummer was not only damn good and played smack on to my liking, but also a leftie, which of course made me warm and fuzzy inside, as I'm a leftie percussionist myself. (Wish I could remember his name, though)

The only negative thing on the whole trip was that we misinterpreted the flight details, and missed our flight. Because these tickets were bought online (but not cheap!) there was nothing they could help us with, and we had to buy new tickets; 600$ later, and the vanishing of our christmas budget. So the take here is that Qantas sucks, and don't buy your tickets online.

Thanks, Melbourne, for a fantastic four nights. It certainly gave us a craving for more. See you in a little while.

Need unique talent?

There's a distinct chance that in about two months I'll be out of a job. I've worked for the National Library of Australia for three years now, and after such a time on a contract the job needs to be made permanent. But because I'm not an Australian citizenship they can't employ me permanently due to Australian law (which requires citizenship for permanent jobs). And I can't take out dual citizenship because Norway doesn't support it, nor do I think I'm willing to screw up my identity and future planning based on a quick and possibly stupid decision. So.

So, if you're looking for unique talent, this may be the perfect time to talk to me. I'm not so much your standard programmer as I'm a problem-solver, project manager and the sort of person that aren't afraid of huge problems and unknown territories. In fact, I think I thrive on the really big stuff. I've been in the IT industry for almost 20 years, doing all sorts of stuff, but have a knack for practical knowledge management, team development work and product design. And good ideas.

I have a CV you can peek at. It's reasonably up to date, although I'm working on it. I've also got a LinkedIn profile page you can view. You could read this blog, too, to get an idea of what I could be useful for.

I'm not stuck in Canberra even though right now that's the easiest option (as we have a house here, and somewhat of a network of family and friends). For the right job I'll move around, even back to Norway. We do have a plan of moving down the coast to the Wollongong / South Coast area (more family down there) from which I can commute to Sydney, and if we can make a deal where I work some hours on the train and some hours in Sydney, I'm your man.

Start-ups and consultancies is fine by me; I've been doing that in the past for many years. No more public service, though, and no huge companies unless in brings some serious challenges with it. I'm into everything from information architecture and usability to semantic data modelling and Topic Maps to knowledge management and project management. Feel free to ask. I'm easy to get along with.

Feel free to point people to this blog post, and post any good pointers if you find them. But no general job databases; I hate those, and that's not where the interesting jobs are found. Wish me luck. Cheers.

Update: my email is alexander dotty johannesen at gmail dotty com, where 'dotty' is a dot. Just thought I'd add that.

Sniggleboffs and crimblecakemix

Ouch! I'm rather busy these days, with too many projects and too little time in which to do them. Even on the homefront there are lots and large changes going on, some secret, some not so secret. Each and one of these happenings and projects deserve their own blog post, and now that some of them are nearing completion, I might get time to knock out some proper information on them. What follows are just a few highlights ;

IT Architecture Project is a project that summarises all the best thinking in a library technology kind of way, from future business models to service oriented architectures to federated searches to innovative thinking in the interface domains. Wow, there is just so much good stuff going on. Watch this space for a better explanation of what it is and how it will turn heads both internally and externally.

Atlassian's Confluence Wiki is used at work as an enterprise knowledge sharing space / wiki playground. The out-of-the-box interface sucks big time and isn't anywhere near what you could give to normal people out there. So I've spent a very long time creating a totally new interface that both looks good, extends the functionality and ease of use, and makes more sense of the Confluence Wiki world. I'll be presenting our "Wiki as a intranet sharing tool" as a use-case at a conference in Kuala Lumpur early next year. Again, watch this space.

Meta-rain is a project that I created to try and make a prototype that cheaply and effectivly uses natural vaporization to turn sea-water into fresh-water. Grant applications aside, this is a really interesting project I wish i could spend more time on. Watch this space.

SLRXTM : I'm using the Topic Maps Reference Model to create a rather complex model for library business processing and modelling, coupled with a clever schema-design that swallows MARC, MODS, XOBIS and others with ease, creating a singular model. Watch this space.

Sexier, smarter, faster IA with Topic Maps slides and podcast is up

My presentation from the OZ-IA conference last month are up as a podcast (all of the great presentations are here), and I've embedded my presentation slides below with SlideShare.net so you can try to browse along. There are 133 slides, but a lot of them really are bits of the same slide, and I go through them fast. Enjoy; it was a lot of fun. And excuse my ... er, "um"s.

Homosexuality in the animal kingdom

This won't make too much sense to most non-norwegians, but a very good old friend of mine Petter Bøckman (biologist and live roleplayer extraordinaire) and some other guy have made what they reckon is the worlds first exhibition about homosexuality in the animal kingdom. it is far more common than what people think. I used to live with Petter, and the stories he would tell about midget chimpanzees!

Congratulations, and I hope we'll see similar initiatives throughout the world.

Event : talk : Angela Beesley ; Wikipedia, wikis and the future of free content

Angela Beesley is coming to the National Library of Australia to hold a talk here about "Wikipedia, wikis and the future of free content" which should be interesting to most people. Here's the blurb ;

Topic: Wikipedia, wikis and the future of free content
Speaker: Angela Beesley

Angela Beesley has been involved with Wikipedia since early 2003. She is also the co-founder and Vice President of Wikia, a wiki hosting service which extends the model of Wikipedia into non-encyclopedic content areas.

Until recently, Angela Beesley served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation which runs Wikipedia and a number of other open content wikis.

Prior to her involvement with Wikipedia, Angela was a researcher and test developer for the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales. She has been in Melbourne for almost a year.