A Note about Approach

We sought out interaction themes by looking at what community members are accomplishing (or want to accomplish) with the twiki, rather than how the twiki is constructed. While this approach might seem to be the heart of what the sense-making folks call a verbing approach, we learned that we needed to be explicit about including those verbs in all of our materials, else the underlying-infrastructure-centric view would quickly start to creep back. This change is reflected here, as well as in the comments in the CSS files, etc.

Deepening participation leads to clarified themes in Ahat Skin v0.1

We followed our usual toolbox approach to agile methods (in this case some pair programming, some contextual inquiry, reusing and refactoring the code from NatSkin? , with a particular focus on creating more orthogonal code elements) in implementing the themes from version 0.02. Another agile theme was collecting a growing set of scenarios and thus developing the raw material for a testbed. Contrary to my usual practice of test-driven development I held off on implementing the tests for the moment, as we were in such a fluid phase as to our design parameters, and I am still sorting out TWiki's testing framework culture.

[... discuss the four themes as they stand at present ...]

Themes for Ahat/AhatTWiki.AhatSkin, v0.02

Moral of the story is the importance of (1) the navigation palettes, and (2) ease of editing those navigation palettes. We just don't really use any topics other than what we are currently focused on unless they are in front of our faces. Geesh.

Ok. So, after living with the first version of the skin (collectively) for all of June and part of July, and my living with a wierd combination of v0.01 in most of the twiki, but v0.02 in Sandbox, and growing to hate v0.01 as I worked on the next version, we refined the interaction themes. We have:

• topics (individual pages)
  • once divorced from the tools that are also structurally managed the same way as topics [...]
  • see also topic palettes in Ahat/AhatTWiki.AhatSkin v0.02?
• tools (three types)
  • focus on a single topic:
    • edit, attach, 'raw' (view the markup), diffs (history might be a better term), rename/move, delete
    • manage:
      • preferences, backlinks, playing with, moving, re-arranging, etc.
  • by default, address more than one topic:
    • update the topic palettes
    • recent changes
    • web statistics
    • notifications
    • list everything (tools, components, and topics) [...]
    • start a topic [...]
    • the tools palette in v0.02 was a big hit
  • search - this is a tool, although it certainly does seem to dominate the way most students use information resources on the web. I know that even I do find it irritating when I have to go digging for search.
• personalize your twiki account
  • starts with the welcome info and the twiki guidelines and an invitation to personalize
• trying to organize topics into a larger framework:
  • quite frankly, the subwebs thing doesn't seem to have much of a grip, so far. On the whole, I'd call it a lose, because the secondary relationships just aren't at all hierarchical. It was somewhat useful to get bootstrapped, but I think we might want to ditch subwebs with the release of v0.02, and easy access to editing "within this web"

Themes for Ahat/AhatTWiki.AhatSkin, v0.01

Looking at:

• how we were using our alpha installation
• the default configuration for NatSkin

we identified five interaction themes (this is after several iterations):

• web & subwebs
• utilities
• topics
• search
• personalization

After living with Ahat/AhatTWiki.AhatSkinV0dot01 for a week, we further refined the utility theme (upper right-hand utilities area) into personalization utilities, topic utilities and web/subweb utilities, so perhaps that reduces the themes back to four? - 27 May 2008

• web & subwebs
• topics
• search
• personalization

• utilities (in a utilities area? - upper right-hand corner...)