Usability Analysis of WordPress
by Patrick HavensHow *NOT* to get noticed
Usability analysis of WordPress
Liz seems to have a lot of fans. On the board of AIGA, she has a lot great credentials. For this lecture she’s been studying WordPress for a bit about this.
She starts by talking about he design of elevators. Generally people don’t notice elevator design. The change is wher you tell the elevator where you want to go, and the elevator will tell you which elevator to take, and tell you when to get off. And it saves 20-30%. But it doesn’t take in mind the human error. And people will change things when it doesn’t work.
HappyCog took a look at it, so they can improve the design. The HappyCog team and Matt are the ones working on this project.
Great quote on Mark’s blog. You know WordPress is working well, when you don’t realize its working….
“unconcious design” or “transparent design”
She watched many times users using the admin. She went to users homes and watched them. And she broke it down to personas.
We learned some things: (NEW ADMIN IN 2.4)
Users don’t care what designers attended.
She showed a picture where a developer put a path… and people created their own well used path going a different way.
Most visited screens by numbers (They studied it) Screenshot of admin with only a few things highlighted. Those where the main things.
They want different info on the dashboard. A modulear dashboard… like widgets.
Don’t just listen to people, watch people.
People like it when they aren’t surprised.
Nouns verses Verbs?
They wanted to see if they should rename things. And so they looked for the more intutive ways to deal with things.
Verbs Won.
Drafts are not drafts most of the time. Working on aexpanding the terms… Published, Not Published, Scheduled…
Cleaning things up so that scheduling posts is cleaner and more intutive.
Widgets screen would be cleaned up. Allow for definitions, with visual and textual reinforcement.
When you make a post, you’ll be returned to the manage posts page, rather then write a new post page.
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Ideas on the Elements
URLS:
They are going to be looking over the hidden system pages also.
Mainly they’ll be working on consistancy over all. Plugins also needs consistancy. So they appear in expected places.
Comment Panel is sorta frustrating… They’ll make it seem more like the gmail interface… Replying from within the admin interface.
Admin Themes - Its been thought about, but.
The feeds will still be there. And you will be able to use custom feeds.
Photo management will be tweaked. With a cleaner interface, and will allow you to select differnt sizes, and adjust settings.
You might be able to custoimize the menus of the admin.
Cleaning up and using permalinks with the admin.
And Matt will go over the changes in the State of the WordPress
July 26th, 2007 at 11:36 am
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