You have probably seen a comment on a website do something like:
Hello, world!
I am a block quote.
One common, simple styling of blockquotes is to throw a left border on them, maybe some indent, and call it a day. Even some rich-text-esque e-mail programs do that for quoting in replies.
Now you may have seen a comment on a website do something like:
| Hey, answer my question: what?
The answer is mu.
That use of the vertical bar (|; a.k.a. pipe; see Wikipedia: Vertical bar) is an example of cargo culting. People reading comments see the left-bordered replies and say, “okay, good, a distinctive way to quote exists,” but they fail to guess that the quote character is > (a.k.a. greater-than).
Still, if you see users cargo culting something, it tells you a couple of things:
- They think the behavior they’re trying to mimic is valuable for some reason.
- It isn’t easy enough for them to discover how to do it.
I nearly wrote “the right way” for [2] there, but if it were the right way, then it would be discoverable.
There are options:
- Adopt the cargo-cult attempt as the new way (or an alternative way).
- Implement a rich editor (e.g., with a shiny “quote” button).
- Make it easier to “view-source” of existing comments so users can see the secret sauce.
Something like [3] is the way to go in this instance. Let people learn from each other without explicitly needing to ask, “how?” If a user sees another with a fancy comment, they might dig into the source (when available) to see how it works.
This is the way we traditionally learn: observation. That’s how we learned to speak, and to a lesser extent how we learned to write and read.
In general, if you see mistakes being made with a piece of software that’s an opportunity for improved design. One source of inspiration should be video games. If you watch the commentaries from Valve Software’s games, they have a common pattern for learning game mechanics.
- Show the user the mechanic in action.
- Let them try it in a simple example.
- Trap them until they show they’ve got it down pat.
The games Portal and Portal 2 are chock-full of this pattern. You start out not even holding the portal gun, only learning you can move through portals. Then you only control one portal. Finally you learn to control both.
In more advanced puzzles you learn about conserving momentum to fling yourself, or in the second game how to paint with and make use of the gels.
Only after you have completed what amounts to a whole set of portal classes do you get to the part of the games where you are apparently fighting to win, but the whole experience (classes and all) are kept enjoyable.
We don’t currently approach general software in that manner. The first time you fire up Firefox, you aren’t presented with a puzzle of how to open a webpage, for example.
But maybe you should be.