-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
md_problems.txt
25 lines (20 loc) · 1.2 KB
/
md_problems.txt
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/15919/is-markdown-friendly-enough-for-non-technical-users
I know I'm coming to this thread rather late, but I actually have run usability
tests comparing a WYSIWYG editor (iWeb) to a non-WYSIWYG editor based mostly on
markdown.
Here's what I've found that users struggle with when using markdown:
Tags that require character-level precision. For example, a user's inclination
is to put a space between the square brackets and parentheses when making a
link--but that doesn't work. Likewise, lists only work when there is a space
after the asterisk or dash.
They get paragraphs fine, but users are often inclined to use a single linebreak
(when formatting an address, for example) and these are ignored if you don't add
two spaces to the line before. Not intuitive, and those two spaces are
invisible.
More complicated tags, like for links and images, slow them down more than
simple ones (like for strong and em)--but they can eventually get it if there's
a helpful guide.
Users are often not confident that X will work or unsure of exactly what it will
do.
Users don't always understand paths, directories, files, file extensions, URLs,
etc. This makes making links and images difficult.