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by _odey 2173 days ago
I've installed wikijs for a small team of developers at their request.

The biggest selling point for this piece of software, compared to showing them 5 other alternatives, is that it looks good, it's eye candy. And that is exactly what I've seen people want from software like these. They want to feel good when they open it and browse, they want to see a modern look, it makes the experience of using and maintaining a knowledge base more appealing so they engage more. Feature wise it's no confluence, nor xwiki, it's just a page editor with user management, but it's quick to set up, uses extreemely little memory by default, feels fast and looks good, so they don't mind if they see some functionality missing.

Among more and more tools that I install for people I see this pattern where they are judged by their looks above features, and it's not easy for me to fully understand it... But then again I started learning and programming ruby for the same reason, it looked and felt good, so I stuck with it.

So I guess the big takeaway here is not a large pepperoni pizza from domino's, but the fact that software looks matter, a lot, and it's probably going to matter more and more in the future.

2 comments

What's not so easy to understand that the looks matter?

I've gone through a list of wiki apps a few months ago as DokuWiki was showing its age, every time the demo page looked like some web from the 90's, I don't care what features it has but closed it instantly.

I do full stack web but I make sure it's also visually pleasing for anything I build because there's no reason to give users eye pain.

I'd rather think that anything that doesn't look good means the author had no time for visual adjustment as the internals still has a lot to be desired.

ah, interesting. I guess the implication in your comment is that there are other, more capable alternatives (but not as "pretty"). What are some of the criteria where wikijs is lacking? For me, wikijs was leading in all the criteria I mentioned in my original post.