Wiki: the Beauty & the Beast. Usability & Functionality (Event) | Zoli’s Blog
Silicon Valley Web Builder will host a wiki-focused event tomorrow, Wednesday….

“MindTouch is transforming the Wiki from the Web’s best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart. Their Deki Wiki Hayes release is perhaps the most extendable Wiki tool available today.” I had to steal that line from Read/WriteWeb, I couldn’t have said it any better

Tomorrow I’ll be in Fremont speaking on a panel about how MindTouch has approached usability with our wiki. This is an aspect of Deki Wiki I’m especially proud of. Deki Wiki is often cited as having a highly usable and intuitive interface. Here are the top 5 ways Deki Wiki is more usable than other wikis:

1. Hierarchical organization. We’re one of the few wikis that allows users to organize and permission pages hierarchically. Without this, people get lost in the flatness of the wiki.
2. Familiar and clean UI design. Look at the menu-ing and UI elements of Deki Wiki. It’s similar to what you would expect from a desktop productivity tool. We’ve spent extensive time doing usability testing in our first year of development with a wide audience of users. We’ve removed a lot of visual noise. Our UI works.
3. Fewer clicks. Compare MindTouch Deki Wiki to others on simple tasks. Let’s say attaching files. With Deki Wiki you can do it drag-and-drop or if you’re not using the Desktop Connector you can add files in a single click. Others require 3 or 4 clicks where we do things in 1.
4. One of the best in-browser WYSIWYG editors. Users can still use wiki-text for common things like linking, but they do not have to. We provide very intuitive modal dialogs for browsing the wiki.
5. Wiki-text? Blech. We store all content in XHTML. We’re one of the few (perhaps only) wiki vendors that do this. Wiki-text is non-standard. It’s also not as powerful. Our power users have the full freedom and power of HTML/CSS/Javascript to layout rich interactive pages.

I look forward to communicating and demonstrating MindTouch’s exceptional design at the event and I’m thankful for the invite.