The user interface for the Wikispaces project is being designed using the Hesperion textbook 'Disabled Village Children' as an example of a mixin or digital supplement for a textbook. Each digital supplement consist of an online component, and an associated local component which can be downloaded by the user.

The goal of such a digital supplement being to allow for a more collaborative writing experience for the editors and authors of the textbook, and allowing readers to discuss the content amongst themselves and provide feedback to the authors. Additionally, the ability to download a local copy of the textbook, which also allows note taking and participating in discussion, allows for the text to be used and edited even without internet access. This is a useful feature for authors and readers like.

Online component (provided by Wikispaces)

The following mock-ups illustrate the suggested user interface and experience for the online component provided by Wikispaces, and should for the most part be self-explanatory. Please note that the user interface is slightly different when viewed by a visitor to the site who is not signed in, as compared to for an editor who is signed in. These differences are explained below. The mock-ups:

Mockup main page

1. The main page of the digital supplement for 'Disabled Village Children' for a reader visiting the site: mockup-mainpage.png
2. The contents page of the digital supplement as seen by a reader: mockup-contents.png
3. The discussion for the 'Polio' page of the digital supplement: mockup-discussion.png
4. The main page of the digital supplement for 'Disabled Village Children' for an author/editor who is logged in: mockup-loggedin.png

Mock-ups #1 and #4 depict the same page of the digital supplement, yet there are some small differences in the user interface since in #4 the user is an editor/author who is logged in and hence has access to editing facilities. The differences in the interface when a user is logged in include:

• An 'Actions Menu' in the right hand side menu column. This allows editors to add new pages, view recent changes and make administrative changes to the digital supplement.
• An 'edit this page' option next to the title of each page, which is not available to regular readers.
• A 'history' tab next to the 'discussion' tab for each page, to easily view and compare any changes made to the page by editors.

Other design considerations and open issues:

• Disabled Village Children, and all textbooks in general, tend to have very long contents pages with lists of chapters. Fitting this into the right-hand menu is impractical, therefore the contents listing has been placed in a separate page.
• The first page - home - describes the book and introduces the concept of the digital supplement.
• The above mock-ups illustrate the concept from a technical stand point. For better illustration of the general concept and benefits of digital supplements, we should construct an illustrated user story in the form of a slideshow.
• How should the original html text be divided? One page per chapter might lead to a lot of scrolling. However, if we divide it into smaller pieces we would need some form of navigation between the pages. Where to divide? This would have to be decided manually.
• The user interface depicted above has been customized for use as digital supplements for textbooks. For general Wikispaces/TiddlyWiki integration, the Wikispaces UI would be identical to the default UI.

Local offline component (provided by TiddlyWiki)

Mock-up of user interface for local copy of the digital supplement: mockup-local.png

Design considerations and open issues:

• To provide an intuitive user experience, the TiddlyWiki should be in SinglePageMode, so that opening a new tiddler closes the previous tiddler, and only one tiddler/page is open at any one time.
• The chapter titles in the contents listing are too lengthy to place them in the right hand menu. Placing the contents in a separate tiddler leads to a disruptive reading experience. The reader loses his place when viewing the contents. What other alternatives are there? A slide out contents listing of some sort?
• Discussion items: Discussion items associated with pages on Wikispaces take the form of threads. While we can add a tab to each tiddler to display its discussion items, how will we achieve threading within each item? How would discussion items be saved?
• We need to improve the user friendliness of TiddlyWiki for new users. Ideally we need a new user wizard, that runs the first time the file is opened, auto-detects the browser and guides the user throwing the saving process. This was also discussed as a general improvement for TiddlyWiki, and could be developed in conjunction with Osmosoft and the TiddlyWiki community.